The Peloponnesian War

For it is evident that the country now called Hellas was not settled securely in the old days. Instead, there were migrations in earlier times, and each people readily abandoned its own land whenever it was pressed by some others who were always more numerous. There was no trade, and they did not mix with one another without fear, either by land or by sea. Each people worked its own land only enough to live on. They had no surplus of wealth and did not plant orchards, since it was uncertain when someone else would come and take it from them, especially as they had no walls. And since they thought they could get their necessary daily food anywhere, they moved away without difficulty. For this reason they were strong neither in the size of their cities nor in their other resources. It was the best land that always saw the most changes of inhabitants: what is now called Thessaly, Boeotia, most of the Peloponnese except Arcadia, and the most fertile parts of the rest of the country.

For the quality of the land allowed some people to acquire greater power, and this bred civil strife, which ruined them. At the same time they were more exposed to the designs of outsiders. Attica, at any rate, was free from civil strife for the longest time because of the poverty of its soil, and it was always inhabited by the same people. Here is no small proof of my argument that it was because of the migrations that the rest of Greece did not grow in the same way. The most powerful of those driven out of the rest of Greece by war or civil strife withdrew to the Athenians, as a place of safety. By becoming citizens they made the city still greater in population from very early times, so that later, since Attica was not large enough, the Athenians even sent out colonies to Ionia.note

Homer is the best evidence of this. Though he lived long after even the Trojan War, he nowhere uses the name for them all, nor for anyone except the followers of Achilles from Phthiotis, who were in fact the first Hellenes. In his poems he calls them Danaans, Argives and Achaeans. Nor, for that matter, does he speak of “non-Greeks,” because, as I think, the Greeks had not yet been set apart under a single name as their counterpart. In any case, those who came to be called Hellenes, first city by city, wherever they understood one another’s speech, and later all together, did nothing collectively before the Trojan War, because of their weakness and their lack of contact with one another. And even this expedition they undertook together only once they had come to make greater use of the sea.

For in early times, once they began to cross to one another by ship more often, the Greeks turned to piracy, and so did those non-Greeks who lived on the coasts of the mainland or held islands. They were led by men of no small power, who sought profit for themselves and a living for the poor. They would fall on cities that were unwalled and made up of scattered villages and plunder them, and they got most of their living this way. The practice did not yet carry any shame. Rather, it brought a certain glory.

This is shown even now by some of the mainland peoples, among whom it is a mark of distinction to do it well. It is also shown by the old poets, in whose works people everywhere ask those who put in by sea whether they are pirates. This implies that those who were asked did not think the work beneath them, and that those who were concerned to know did not reproach them for it. They also plundered one another on land. To this day much of Greece lives in the old way: around the Ozolian Locrians, the Aetolians, the Acarnanians and that part of the mainland. And the habit of carrying weapons has survived among these mainland peoples from the old piracy.note

For all Greece used to carry weapons, because their homes were unprotected and travel between them was unsafe, and going about armed became part of their daily life, as it is for the non-Greeks. The fact that these parts of Greece still live this way is a sign of habits that were once common to all.

The Spartans were also the first to strip naked, undressing in public and rubbing themselves with oil when they exercised. In the old days, even at the Olympic Games, athletes competed with loincloths around their genitals, and it is not many years since this stopped. Even now, among some non-Greeks, especially those in Asia, prizes are offered for boxing and wrestling, and they compete in loincloths. And one could point to many other ways in which the early Greek world lived like the non-Greek world of today.

The islanders, who were Carians and Phoenicians, were no less pirates; for it was these peoples who settled most of the islands. Here is the proof. When Delos was purified by the Athenians during this war, and all the graves of the dead on the island were removed, over half were found to be Carians. They were recognized by the kind of arms buried with them and by the way of burial that the Carians still use today.note

Once the navy of Minos was established, people could sail to one another more easily. For he drove the evildoers out of the islands, at the same time as he settled most of them. Those who lived by the sea now applied themselves more to acquiring wealth and lived more securely, and some even built walls around themselves, as they were growing richer than before. In their desire for gain the weaker were willing to submit to servitude under the stronger, while the more powerful, who had surplus resources, made the smaller cities their subjects. It was when they had gone further along this path that, at a later time, they made their expedition against Troy.

Mycenae and the rule to Atreus, as his kinsman (Atreus, they say, happened to be in exile from his father because of the death of Chrysippus). When Eurystheus did not come back, the Mycenaeans, out of fear of the Heraclids, wanted Atreus as king; he also seemed a capable man and had won the favor of the people of Mycenae and of all whom Eurystheus ruled. So Atreus took over the kingship, and the descendants of Pelops became greater than those of Perseus. All this, I think, Agamemnon inherited. And since he had [also] become stronger at sea than the others, he gathered the expedition and carried it out not so much through goodwill as through fear.note

For it is clear that he arrived with the most ships himself and supplied ships to the Arcadians as well, as Homer has shown, if his evidence is enough for anyone. And in the passage about the handing down of the scepter, Homer has said that Agamemnon was “lord of many islands and of all Argos.” Now as a mainlander he could not have ruled islands beyond the neighboring ones, and these would not be many, unless he had some sort of navy. And it is from this expedition that we must infer what the earlier ones were like.note

So it is not reasonable to doubt the tradition, or to look at the appearance of cities rather than their power. We should rather believe that that expedition was the greatest of all before it, but fell short of those of our own day—if here too we should put any trust in Homer’s poetry. As a poet, he is likely to have embellished it on the side of greatness, and yet even so it appears rather modest. For he has made it twelve hundred ships, the Boeotian ships carrying a hundred and twenty men each and those of Philoctetes fifty. By this he indicates, I think, the largest and the smallest; at any rate, he did not mention the size of any others in the Catalogue of Ships.note

That the men rowed for themselves and that all of them were fighters he has shown in the case of Philoctetes’ ships, for he has made all the oarsmen archers. Nor is it likely that many passengers sailed with them apart from the kings and those highest in command. This is all the more so since they were about to cross the open sea with the equipment of war, and in boats that were not decked, but fitted out rather in the old pirate fashion. So if one takes the mean between the largest and the smallest ships, it is clear that not many came, considering that they were sent jointly from the whole of Greece.

But if they had come with a surplus of supplies, and had kept together and carried on the war without a break, without plundering and farming, they would easily have won in battle and taken the city. After all, even when they were not together, but only the part of them present at any given time, they held their own. And if they had sat down to a siege they would have taken Troy in less time and with less trouble. But because of the lack of money, the undertakings before this were weak, and even this one, though more famous than any before it, proves in fact to have fallen short of its reputation and of the account of it that now prevails because of the poets.

For even after the Trojan War Greece was still subject to migrations and resettlement, so that it could not be at peace and grow. The return of the Greeks from Ilium, which took a long time, brought about many changes, and civil strife broke out widely in the cities, and those driven out by it founded new cities. The present-day Boeotians, driven out of Arne by the Thessalians in the sixtieth year after the capture of Ilium, settled the land now called Boeotia, which was formerly called Cadmeis. (A portion of them had been living in this land earlier, and it was from these that the Boeotians who went to Ilium came.) And in the eightieth year the Dorians, together with the Heraclids, took possession of the Peloponnese. Only with difficulty, and after a long time, did Greece settle down securely and stop being uprooted, and then it sent out colonies. The Athenians founded the settlements of the Ionians and most of those of the islanders, while the Peloponnesians founded most of the settlements in Italy and Sicily and some places in the rest of Greece. All these were founded after the Trojan War.note

The earliest sea battle we know of was fought between the Corinthians and the Corcyraeans, and this too was about two hundred and sixty years before the same date. For the Corinthians, since their city lay on the Isthmus, always had a trading center. In the old days the Greeks, both those inside the Peloponnese and those outside it, dealt with each other more by land than by sea, and so they passed through Corinthian territory. The Corinthians were therefore powerful in wealth, as the old poets also show, for they called the place “wealthy.”note

And when the Greeks began to take more to the sea, the Corinthians acquired ships and put down piracy, and by providing a market on both routes, by land and by sea, they made their city powerful through its revenues. Later the Ionians built a large navy, in the time of Cyrus, the first king of the Persians, and Cambyses his son; and fighting against Cyrus they controlled the sea along their own coast for a time. Polycrates, tyrant of Samos in the time of Cambyses, was strong at sea and made a number of the islands his subjects; he also captured Rheneia and dedicated it to Delian Apollo. And the Phocaeans, while they were founding Massalia, defeated the Carthaginians in a sea battle.note

For these were the most powerful of the navies. But even these, though they came many generations after the Trojan War, evidently had few triremes and were still made up of penteconters and long boats, like the earlier navies. Shortly before the Persian Wars and the death of Darius, who was king of the Persians after Cambyses, the tyrants in Sicily and the Corcyraeans acquired triremes in large numbers. These were the last navies worth mentioning to be established in Greece before Xerxes’ expedition. For the Aeginetans and the Athenians, and whatever others had any, possessed small navies, made up mostly of penteconters. It was only recently that Themistocles persuaded the Athenians, when they were at war with the Aeginetans and the Persian invasion was also expected, to build the ships with which they actually fought at sea; and even these did not yet have decks running their full length.note

Various obstacles also arose in various places to prevent different peoples from growing. In the case of the Ionians, when their affairs had advanced to greatness, Cyrus and the Persian kingdom overthrew Croesus and everything between the river Halys and the sea, then marched against them and enslaved the cities on the mainland. Later Darius, with the strength of the Phoenician fleet, enslaved the islands as well.note

As for the tyrants in the Greek cities, they looked ahead only to their own interests, both to their personal safety and to the increase of their own house, and they governed their cities with security foremost, as far as they possibly could. No achievement worth mentioning was accomplished by them, except perhaps against their own neighbors; only the tyrants in Sicily advanced very far in power. Thus Greece was held back on every side for a long time, so that it accomplished nothing notable in common, and its individual cities lacked enterprise.

In the tenth year after it the Persians came once more with their great armada to enslave Greece. With great danger hanging over them, the Spartans took the lead of the Greeks who joined in the war, since they were foremost in power. As the Persians advanced, the Athenians resolved to abandon their city. They packed up their belongings, went on board their ships, and became a seafaring people. Together the Greeks drove off the Persians. But not long afterward they split apart: both the Greeks who had revolted from the King and those who had fought in the war together sided some with the Athenians and some with the Spartans.note

For these two had shown themselves the greatest in power: the one was strong on land, the other at sea. For a short time the alliance in arms held together. Then the Spartans and the Athenians fell out and made war on each other, each with their allies, and any of the other Greeks who had a quarrel anywhere now went over to one side or the other. So from the Persian Wars down to this war, now making truces, now fighting, either with each other or with their own allies when these revolted, they brought their military forces to a fine state of readiness and grew more experienced, because they did their training in the midst of real dangers.

The Spartans led their allies without making them pay tribute. Instead they took care that the allies were governed by oligarchies, in a way that suited the Spartans alone. The Athenians, in the course of time, took over the ships of the allied cities, except for those of Chios and Lesbos, and assessed all the rest for payments of money. And so, for this war, their own separate forces became greater than they had ever been when they flourished at their strongest with the alliance still intact.

There are many other things, too, which still exist even now and have not been forgotten through the passage of time, about which the rest of the Greeks also hold mistaken beliefs. They think, for example, that each of the Spartan kings casts not one vote but two, and that the Spartans have a “Pitanate company,” which never existed at all. So little trouble do most people take in searching for the truth, and so readily do they turn to whatever lies ready to hand.note

Still, on the evidence I have given, no one would go wrong in thinking that things were very much as I have described them. He should not put more trust in what the poets have sung about them, embellishing them to make them greater, or in what the prose chroniclers have composed to be more appealing to their hearers than true. Such matters cannot be checked, and most of them have, over time, passed beyond belief into the realm of legend. He should rather consider that these things have been established from the clearest indications, sufficiently so, given that they are ancient. People always judge the war they are fighting to be the greatest while they are in it, and once it is over they admire ancient events more. Even so, this war will show itself, to those who examine it on the basis of the actual events, to have been greater than those that came before it.

The facts were found out with great labor, because those who were present at each event did not give the same account of the same things, but spoke according to their sympathies for one side or the other, or according to their memory. When it is heard read aloud, its lack of the legendary may perhaps make it seem less pleasing. But it will be enough if it is judged useful by those who want to see clearly what happened, and what, human nature being what it is, will happen again at some time in the same or a similar way. It has been composed as a possession for all time rather than a prize composition to be heard for the moment.

Things that had been told by hearsay before, but more rarely confirmed in fact, ceased to be incredible. There were earthquakes, which affected the largest part of the earth at once and were also the most violent; eclipses of the sun, which occurred more frequently than is remembered from earlier times; great droughts in some places, and famines resulting from them; and, not least harmful, the plague, which destroyed a part of the population. All these things came upon them together with this war.

Epidamnus is a city on the right as you sail into the Ionian Gulf. Its neighbors are the Taulantians, a non-Greek Illyrian people. The Corcyraeans founded it as a colony, but its founder was Phalius son of Eratocleides, a Corinthian of the line of Heracles, who was invited from the mother city in keeping with the ancient custom. Some Corinthians and others of Dorian stock also joined in the settlement. As time went on, the city of the Epidamnians became powerful and populous. But after many years of civil strife among themselves, so it is said, they were ruined in a war with the neighboring non-Greeks and lost much of their power.note

Finally, just before this war, their people drove out the powerful. These returned with the non-Greeks and plundered those in the city by land and sea. Hard pressed, the Epidamnians in the city sent envoys to Corcyra as their mother city. They begged the Corcyraeans not to stand by and watch them being destroyed, but to reconcile the exiles with them and put an end to the war with the non-Greeks. They made these requests sitting as suppliants in the temple of Hera. But the Corcyraeans did not accept their supplication and sent them away with nothing accomplished.note

The Corinthians undertook to help them, both on grounds of justice, since they considered the colony no less theirs than the Corcyraeans’, and at the same time out of hatred for the Corcyraeans, who neglected them even though they were Corinth’s colonists. For the Corcyraeans did not grant them the customary privileges at the common festivals, nor give a Corinthian the first share at their sacrifices, as the other colonies did. Instead they looked down on them. At that time the Corcyraeans were a match in wealth for the richest of the Greeks and stronger in military resources. They prided themselves on being, at times, far superior at sea, and on the fame for seafaring of the Phaeacians, who had lived in Corcyra before them (which was all the more reason for them to keep fitting out their navy, and they were far from weak: they had a hundred and twenty triremes when they began the war)—note

with grievances, then, on all these counts, the Corinthians gladly sent the help to Epidamnus. They invited anyone who wished to go as a settler, and sent a garrison of Ambraciots, Leucadians and their own men. These went by land to Apollonia, a Corinthian colony, for fear that the Corcyraeans might stop them if they crossed by sea.

The Corinthians, for their part, when messengers came to them from Epidamnus to say that it was under siege, prepared an expedition. At the same time they proclaimed a colony to Epidamnus, on terms of full equality, for anyone who wished to go; and if anyone did not want to sail at once but wished to have a share in the colony, he could stay behind by depositing fifty Corinthian drachmas. Many sailed, and many paid the money. They also asked the Megarians to escort them with ships, in case the Corcyraeans should try to prevent them from sailing. The Megarians got ready to sail with them with eight ships, and the Paleans of Cephallenia with four. They also asked the Epidaurians, who provided five; the Hermionians provided one, the Troezenians two, the Leucadians ten, and the Ambraciots eight. They asked the Thebans and the Phliasians for money, and the Eleans for unmanned ships and money. Of the Corinthians’ own forces, thirty ships and three thousand hoplites were made ready.note

But they warned them not to make war. Otherwise, they said, they too would be forced by the Corinthians’ violence to make friends they did not want, other than their present ones, in order to get help. The Corinthians replied that if the Corcyraeans withdrew their ships and the non-Greeks from Epidamnus, they would consider the matter; but until then it was not right for the Epidamnians to be besieged while they themselves went to arbitration. The Corcyraeans countered that they would do this if the Corinthians also withdrew their people from Epidamnus. They were also ready, they said, for both sides to stay where they were and make a truce until the case was decided.

The Corinthians would listen to none of this. When their ships were manned and their allies had arrived, they first sent ahead a herald to declare war on the Corcyraeans. Then they set out with seventy-five ships and two thousand hoplites and sailed for Epidamnus to make war on the Corcyraeans. The ships were commanded by Aristeus son of Pellichus, Callicrates son of Callias and Timanor son of Timanthes, and the infantry by Archetimus son of Eurytimus and Isarchidas son of Isarchus. When they reached Actium in the territory of Anactorium, where the temple of Apollo stands at the mouth of the Ambracian Gulf, the Corcyraeans sent a herald ahead to them in a light boat to forbid them to sail against Corcyra. At the same time they manned their ships, bracing the old ones to make them seaworthy and refitting the rest.

The herald brought back no peaceful answer from the Corinthians, and the Corcyraean ships were now manned, eighty in number (forty were besieging Epidamnus). So the Corcyraeans put out to meet the enemy, drew up their line and fought a sea battle. They won decisively and destroyed fifteen of the Corinthian ships. On the same day it also happened that their forces besieging Epidamnus brought it to surrender on terms: the newcomers were to be sold, and the Corinthians kept in chains until some other decision was made.note

After the sea battle the Corcyraeans set up a trophy on Leucimme, a headland of Corcyra. They put to death the other prisoners they had taken, but kept the Corinthians in chains. Later, after the Corinthians and their allies had gone back home, defeated at sea, the Corcyraeans were masters of the whole sea in those parts. They sailed to Leucas, the Corinthian colony, and ravaged its land, and they burned Cyllene, the harbor town of the Eleans, because the Eleans had provided ships and money to the Corinthians.note

For most of the time after the sea battle they controlled the sea, sailing against the Corinthians’ allies and doing them damage. This went on until, as the summer came round, the Corinthians sent ships and an army, since their allies were suffering, and encamped at Actium and around Cheimerium in Thesprotis, to protect Leucas and the other cities that were friendly to them. The Corcyraeans set up a camp facing them at Leucimme, with ships and infantry. Neither side sailed against the other. They sat facing each other for this summer, and when winter had already come, both withdrew home.

For we, who have never before been anyone’s allies by choice, now come to ask others for this, and at the same time this very policy has left us isolated in our present war with the Corinthians. What once seemed our good sense, refusing to share dangers in someone else’s alliance at the discretion of a neighbor, has now turned out to look like folly and weakness. In the sea battle that took place, we did beat back the Corinthians on our own. But now they have set out against us with greater forces from the Peloponnese and the rest of Greece, and we see that we cannot prevail with our own strength alone. The danger, too, is great if we fall under their power. So necessity compels us to ask for help from you and from anyone else. And we deserve forgiveness if we now dare to act against our former policy of staying out of affairs, not out of any baseness but rather through an error of judgment.

As for the war, the very thing that would make us useful, if any of you thinks it will not happen, his judgment is mistaken. He does not see that the Spartans, out of fear of you, are eager for war, and that the Corinthians, who have influence with them and are your enemies, are trying to seize us first as a step toward attacking you. They want to keep us from standing together against them in our common hostility, and to make sure they do not miss getting ahead in one of two ways: either by crippling us or by strengthening themselves. Our task, in turn, is to strike first, we by offering the alliance and you by accepting it, and to plot against them before they plot against us, rather than countering their plots.

Nor will you be breaking your treaty with the Spartans by receiving us, since we are allies of neither side. For it is stated in the treaty that any Greek city that is allied to no one may join whichever side it pleases. And it would be outrageous if these people are to be free to man their ships from members of the treaty, and from the rest of Greece as well, and not least from your own subjects, while they shut us out from the alliance that lies open to us and from any help from anywhere else—and then call it a crime if you grant what we ask. We shall have far more ground for complaint against you if we fail to persuade you. You will be turning away us, who are in danger and are not your enemies; and as for these men, who are your enemies and on the attack, you will not only fail to stop them but will even stand by while they draw strength from your own empire.

That is not just. You should either stop them, too, from hiring mercenaries from your domain, or send us help as well, on whatever terms you are persuaded to; best of all, you should accept us openly and help us. As we suggested at the outset, the advantages we can point to are many. The greatest is that we have the same enemies, which is the clearest guarantee there is, and these enemies are not weak but quite capable of harming those who desert them. Besides, when the alliance offered is a naval one and not one on land, rejecting it is not the same thing. Your aim should be, if you can, to let no one else possess ships at all; failing that, to have the strongest naval power as your friend.

For it lies well on the coastal route to Italy and Sicily, so that it can keep a fleet from coming from there to join the Peloponnesians, and can escort a fleet from here to that region; and in other respects too it is extremely advantageous. To sum up as briefly as possible, both as a whole and point by point, here is why you should not abandon us. There are three navies worth mentioning among the Greeks: yours, ours, and the Corinthians’. If you allow two of these to combine, and the Corinthians get hold of us first, you will be fighting at sea against the Corcyraeans and the Peloponnesians together; if you accept us, you will be able to contend with them with your fleet enlarged by our ships.” That is what the Corcyraeans said. After them the Corinthians spoke as follows:

But they are not like that, either toward others or toward us. Though they are our colonists, they have held aloof from us the whole time, and now they are at war with us, saying that they were not sent out to be mistreated. We, for our part, say that we did not found the colony to be insulted by them, but to be their leaders and to receive the respect that is fitting. Our other colonies, at any rate, honor us, and no one holds us in greater affection than our colonists. And clearly, if we please the majority, it could not be right that these alone are displeased with us, nor would we be making this extraordinary expedition against them unless we had been extraordinarily wronged. Even if we were in the wrong, it would have been fine for them to give way to our anger, and shameful for us to use force against their moderation. But in their arrogance and the license that wealth gives them they have committed many offenses against us, and above all over Epidamnus, which was ours. When it was in distress they laid no claim to it; but when we came to its aid, they seized it by force and hold it now.

And they have come here not only having done wrong there themselves, but now asking you to be, not their allies, but their accomplices in wrongdoing, and to accept them while they are at odds with us. They ought to have approached you when they were most secure—not now, when we have been wronged and they are in danger, and when you, who had no share in their power then, are to give them a share of your help now, and, having had no part in their offenses, are to bear an equal share of the blame from us. Only those who shared their power long ago should share in the consequences too.

And yet the just course for you is, ideally, to stand aside from both of us; failing that, to do the opposite and join us against them. You are bound by treaty to the Corinthians, after all, whereas with the Corcyraeans you have never had so much as a truce. And you should not establish the principle that those who revolt from one side are to be received by the other. When the Samians revolted, we did not cast our vote against you, though the rest of the Peloponnesians were divided on whether to help them; we argued openly that each side should be free to punish its own allies. If you are going to receive wrongdoers and help them, it will become clear that just as many of your allies will come over to us, and you will be establishing a principle that tells against yourselves rather than against us.note

We ourselves have now landed in the very situation we spoke of at Sparta, when we said that each side should punish its own allies, and we now claim the same treatment from you in return: having benefited from our vote, do not harm us with yours. Repay like with like, recognizing that this is precisely the moment when the one who helps is the truest friend and the one who opposes is the worst enemy. Do not receive these Corcyraeans as allies against our will, and do not help them in their wrongdoing. If you do this, you will be acting as you should and making the best decision for yourselves.”

For they thought that the war with the Peloponnesians would come anyway, and they did not want to give up Corcyra, with so large a navy, to the Corinthians. They wanted rather to wear the two down against each other as much as possible, so that, if it came to it, they would go to war against the Corinthians and the other naval powers when these were weaker. At the same time, the island seemed to them well placed on the coastal route to Italy and Sicily.

The ships arrived at Corcyra. The Corinthians, once their preparations were complete, sailed against Corcyra with a hundred and fifty ships. Of these, ten were from Elis, twelve from Megara, ten from Leucas, twenty-seven from Ambracia, one from Anactorium, and ninety from Corinth itself. Each city’s contingent had its own generals; the Corinthian commander was Xenocleides son of Euthycles, with four colleagues. Sailing from Leucas, they reached the mainland opposite Corcyra and anchored at Cheimerium in the territory of Thesprotia.

It is a harbor, and above it, some way from the sea, in the Elaeatis district of Thesprotia, lies the city of Ephyra. Near it the Acherusian Lake flows out into the sea; the river Acheron, which runs through Thesprotia, empties into this lake and gives it its name. The river Thyamis also flows there, forming the boundary between Thesprotia and Cestrine, and between these two rivers juts out the headland of Cheimerium. Here, then, the Corinthians anchored off the mainland and made camp.

When the Corcyraeans learned that they were sailing toward them, they manned a hundred and ten ships under the command of Miciades, Aesimides and Eurybatus, and camped on one of the islands called Sybota; the ten Attic ships were there as well. Their land forces were on the headland of Leucimme, together with a thousand hoplites from Zacynthus who had come to their aid. The Corinthians, too, had many non-Greeks on the mainland who had come to support them; for the mainlanders in that region have always been their friends.

When the signals had been raised on both sides, they closed and began the battle. Both sides had many hoplites on their decks, and many archers and javelin-throwers, for they were still equipped in the old way, without much skill. The battle was hard-fought, though not correspondingly skillful; it was more like a battle on land. For whenever they came alongside one another, they could not easily get clear again because of the number and crowding of the ships, and they relied for victory rather more on the hoplites on deck, who stood and fought while the ships stayed motionless. There was no breaking through the enemy line; they fought with fury and brute strength rather than with skill.

Everywhere, then, there was great uproar, and the battle was a confused one. The Attic ships would come up to support the Corcyraeans wherever they were hard pressed and so frightened the enemy, but they did not begin any fighting, because their commanders were afraid of the Athenians’ instructions. The Corinthian right wing suffered most. The Corcyraeans, with twenty ships, routed it, chased the ships, scattered, to the mainland, sailed right up to their camp, landed, burned the abandoned tents and plundered their belongings.

In this part of the battle, then, the Corinthians and their allies were beaten and the Corcyraeans had the upper hand. But where the Corinthians themselves were, on the left, they were winning decisively, since the Corcyraeans, whose numbers had been smaller to begin with, were without the twenty ships that had gone off in pursuit. The Athenians, seeing the Corcyraeans hard pressed, now began to help them more freely, though at first they held back from ramming anyone. But when the rout was plainly under way and the Corinthians were pressing hard, then at last everyone set to work, and no distinction was made any longer; things came to such a pass that the Corinthians and the Athenians attacked each other.

When the Corinthians had chased the Corcyraeans to land, they turned to the wrecks and to their own dead. They recovered most of them and brought them in to Sybota, where the land army of their non-Greek allies had come to support them. (Sybota is a deserted harbor in Thesprotia.) After doing this they regrouped and sailed against the Corcyraeans again. The Corcyraeans put out against them with their seaworthy ships and whatever others they had left, together with the Attic ships, because they were afraid the enemy would try to land on their territory. It was already late, and the paean for the attack had been sung, when the Corinthians suddenly began backing water: they had caught sight of twenty Athenian ships sailing up. The Athenians had sent these out after the ten as reinforcements. They feared what did in fact happen, that the Corcyraeans would be defeated and their own ten ships would be too few to defend them.note

The Corinthians saw these ships first and suspected that they came from Athens and that there were more of them than they could see, so they began to withdraw. The Corcyraeans could not see the ships, which were approaching from a direction more hidden from them, and they were puzzled to see the Corinthians backing water. Then some of them caught sight of the ships and said that there were ships over there sailing up. At that point they too withdrew, since it was already getting dark, and the Corinthians turned about and broke off the engagement. So the two sides separated, and the sea battle ended at nightfall. The Corcyraeans were encamped at Leucimme. These twenty ships from Athens, commanded by Glaucon son of Leagrus and Andocides son of Leogoras, made their way through the corpses and the wrecks and sailed into the camp not long after they had been sighted. Because it was night, the Corcyraeans were afraid they were enemy ships, but then they recognized them, and the ships came to anchor.note

So they decided to put some men into a small boat and send them to the Athenians, without a herald’s staff, to sound them out. They sent the men, who spoke as follows: “You are doing wrong, men of Athens, by starting a war and breaking the treaty. We are punishing our enemies, and you stand in our way and take up arms against us. If you intend to prevent us from sailing against Corcyra, or anywhere else we may wish to go, and you are breaking the treaty, then seize us here first and treat us as enemies.”note

That was what they said. All of the Corcyraean camp that heard it immediately shouted to seize the men and kill them. The Athenians, however, answered as follows: “We are not starting a war, men of the Peloponnese, nor are we breaking the treaty. We have come to help the Corcyraeans here, who are our allies. If you wish to sail anywhere else, we will not stop you. But if you sail against Corcyra or any of its territory, we will not stand by, as far as it is in our power.”

Each side claimed the victory on the following reasoning. The Corinthians set up a trophy because they had been winning the sea battle until nightfall, so that they had brought in the most wrecks and dead. They also held no fewer than a thousand men as prisoners and had sunk about seventy ships. The Corcyraeans had destroyed about thirty ships, and after the Athenians came they had recovered the wrecks and dead on their side. On the previous day the Corinthians had backed water and retreated before them on seeing the Attic ships, and after the Athenians came the Corinthians had not sailed out from Sybota to meet them. For these reasons the Corcyraeans set up a trophy.

In this way each side claimed to have won. On their way home the Corinthians took Anactorium, which lies at the mouth of the Ambracian Gulf, by a trick. The place had been held jointly by the Corcyraeans and themselves. They settled Corinthian colonists there and went back home. Of their Corcyraean prisoners, they sold the eight hundred who were slaves. The other two hundred and fifty they kept in custody and treated with great attention, so that these men might win Corcyra over to them when they returned. Most of them, as it happened, were among the most powerful men in the city. So Corcyra came through the war with the Corinthians, and the Athenian ships left it. This was the first grievance the Corinthians had for going to war with the Athenians: that the Athenians had fought at sea against them alongside the Corcyraeans while the treaty was in force.

The Athenians began making these preparations regarding the Potidaeans immediately after the sea battle at Corcyra. The Corinthians were by now openly hostile, and Perdiccas son of Alexander, king of the Macedonians, had become an enemy, though he had previously been an ally and a friend. He had become an enemy because the Athenians had made an alliance with his brother Philip and with Derdas, who were jointly opposing him. In his fear he sent to Sparta and worked to bring about a war between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians. He was also trying to win over the Corinthians, with a view to bringing about the revolt of Potidaea;

and he made approaches to the Chalcidians and the Bottiaeans in the Thracian region to join in the revolt. He thought that if he had these places, which bordered his own, as allies, it would be easier to fight the war with their help. The Athenians learned of this and wanted to forestall the revolt of the cities. They happened to be sending thirty ships and a thousand hoplites against Perdiccas’ territory, under the command of Archestratus son of Lycomedes and ten other generals. So they instructed the commanders of the ships to take hostages from the Potidaeans and pull down the wall, and to keep watch over the neighboring cities so that they would not revolt.note

Perdiccas also persuaded the Chalcidians to abandon and pull down their cities on the coast and move inland to Olynthus, making it a single strong city. To those who left he gave part of his own territory of Mygdonia, around Lake Bolbe, to live on for as long as the war against the Athenians lasted. So they moved inland, demolishing their cities, and prepared for war;

while the thirty Athenian ships arrived in the Thracian region and found Potidaea and the other places already in revolt. The generals thought it impossible, with the force they had, to fight both Perdiccas and the places that had joined the revolt. So they turned to Macedonia, which was what they had been sent out for in the first place. They established themselves there and made war alongside Philip and the brothers of Derdas, who had invaded from the interior with an army.

Meanwhile the Corinthians grew alarmed. Potidaea was in revolt and the Attic ships were off Macedonia, so they feared for the place and regarded the danger as their own. They sent volunteers from Corinth together with men from the rest of the Peloponnese whom they had persuaded with pay, sixteen hundred hoplites in all and four hundred light troops. Their general was Aristeus son of Adeimantus. It was not least out of friendship for him that most of the soldiers from Corinth went with him as volunteers, for he had always been on good terms with the Potidaeans. They arrived in the Thracian region on the fortieth day after Potidaea revolted.

The news that the cities had revolted reached the Athenians at once. When they learned that Aristeus’ force was also on its way, they sent two thousand of their own hoplites and forty ships against the places in revolt, with Callias son of Calliades and four others as generals. When they arrived in Macedonia, they first found that the earlier thousand had just taken Therme and were besieging Pydna.

They too sat down before Pydna and besieged it. But since Potidaea and Aristeus’ arrival were pressing them, they then made an agreement with Perdiccas, an alliance forced on them by necessity, and withdrew from Macedonia. They went to Beroea, and from there toward Strepsa. They first made an attempt on that place, and when they failed to take it they marched overland toward Potidaea. They had three thousand of their own hoplites, many allies besides, and six hundred Macedonian cavalry, those serving with Philip and Pausanias; at the same time seventy ships sailed along the coast beside them. Advancing by short stages, they reached Gigonus on the third day and pitched camp.

Callias, the Athenian general, and his colleagues for their part sent the Macedonian cavalry and a few of the allies toward Olynthus, to prevent the men there from coming to help. They themselves broke camp and advanced on Potidaea. When they reached the isthmus and saw the enemy preparing for battle, they too took up position facing them, and not long afterward the two sides engaged. Aristeus’ own wing, together with the picked men of the Corinthians and the others who were with him, routed the troops opposite them and went on in pursuit for a long way. But the rest of the army of the Potidaeans and Peloponnesians was beaten by the Athenians and fled inside the city wall.

Olynthus is about sixty stades away and in plain view. When the battle began and the signals were raised, the relief force there that was meant to help the Potidaeans advanced a short way to give help, and the Macedonian cavalry drew up opposite them to stop them. But the Athenian victory came quickly and the signals were taken down, so the relief force went back again inside its wall, and the Macedonians rejoined the Athenians. So neither side had cavalry in the battle. After the battle the Athenians set up a trophy and gave the dead back to the Potidaeans under a truce. Of the Potidaeans and their allies a little under three hundred died. Of the Athenians themselves a hundred and fifty died, and Callias the general.note

The Athenians at once built a wall cutting off the city’s [wall] on the isthmus side, and garrisoned it. The side facing Pallene was left unwalled. They did not think they had enough men both to garrison the isthmus and to cross over to Pallene and build a wall there. They were afraid that if they divided their forces, the Potidaeans and their allies would attack them. When the Athenians in the city learned that Pallene was unwalled, some time later they sent sixteen hundred of their own hoplites, with Phormio son of Asopius as general. He arrived in Pallene and, using Aphytis as his base, brought the army up to Potidaea. He advanced slowly, ravaging the land as he went, and when no one came out to fight he walled off the [wall] on the Pallene side. And so Potidaea was now closely besieged on both sides, and from the sea as well, by ships blockading it at the same time.

Once the city had been walled off, Aristeus had no hope of rescue unless help came from the Peloponnese or something else unexpected happened. He advised that everyone except five hundred men should wait for a favorable wind and sail out, so that the food would last longer, and he himself was willing to be one of those who stayed. When he failed to persuade them, he wanted to prepare the next steps and to make things outside as favorable as possible, so he slipped out by sea without being seen by the Athenian guard. He stayed among the Chalcidians and helped them in the war. In particular, he laid an ambush near the city of the Sermylians and killed many of them. He also negotiated with the Peloponnese to find some way of getting help. After the walling-off of Potidaea, Phormio, with his sixteen hundred men, ravaged Chalcidice and the territory of the Bottiaeans and also took a few small towns.

With Potidaea under siege, however, the Corinthians did not keep quiet, since they had men inside and also feared for the place. They at once called the allies to Sparta, went there themselves and loudly denounced the Athenians for having broken the treaty and for wronging the Peloponnese. The Aeginetans did not openly send envoys, because they were afraid of the Athenians. But in secret they were among the foremost in urging on the war with the Corinthians, saying that they were not autonomous as the treaty provided.note

The Spartans also invited any of the allies, or anyone else, who said they had been wronged in any way by the Athenians. They held their usual assembly of their own citizens and invited the complainants to speak. Various others came forward and made their complaints, each in turn. Among them were the Megarians, who set out a good many other grievances. Above all, they complained that they were excluded from the harbors in the Athenian empire and from the Attic market, contrary to the treaty. The Corinthians came forward last, having first let the others stir up the Spartans, and spoke as follows:note

And you are to blame for this. First you allowed them to fortify their city after the Persian Wars, and later to build the Long Walls. Ever since then, right up to now, you have been depriving of their freedom not only those whom the Athenians have enslaved, but now your own allies as well. For it is not the one who enslaves who truly does it, but the one who could stop it and stands by. That is all the more true if he claims a reputation for excellence as the liberator of Greece. Now at last we have come together, and only with difficulty, and even now not with any clear purpose.note

The question ought no longer to be whether we are being wronged, but how we are to defend ourselves. Those who act have already made their plans, and they move without delay against people who have not yet made up their minds. We know the road the Athenians take, and that they encroach on their neighbors little by little. While they think your obtuseness lets them go unnoticed, they are less bold. But once they realize that you know and are letting it happen, they will press hard. For you alone of the Greeks, Spartans, keep quiet. You defend yourselves against an enemy not with your strength but with your delays. You alone break up your enemies’ growth not when it is beginning but when it has doubled. And yet you used to be called safe and steady. With you, it turns out, the word outstripped the deed.

We ourselves know that the Persians came from the ends of the earth to the Peloponnese before any forces of yours went out to meet them as they should have. And now you look on while the Athenians, who are not far away as the Persians were but close at hand, do as they please. Instead of attacking them yourselves, you prefer to defend yourselves when they attack, and to fight against men far more powerful than you and leave the outcome to chance. Yet you know that the Persians failed mostly through their own fault, and that against the Athenians themselves we have often prevailed more through their own mistakes than through any help from you. The hopes you held out have already ruined some who trusted them and were caught unprepared. And let none of you think that we say this out of hostility rather than by way of reproach. Reproach is for friends who make mistakes; accusation is for enemies who have done wrong.

What is more, they are unhesitating where you are dilatory, and always abroad where you are the greatest stay-at-homes. They think that by going away they may gain something, while you think that by going out you may damage even what you already have. When they defeat their enemies, they push on as far as possible; when they are beaten, they fall back as little as possible. Moreover, they spend their bodies in the city’s service as though those bodies belonged to someone else, but use their minds, when it comes to doing something for it, as their very own. Whatever they have planned and not followed through, they reckon a loss of what was already theirs. Whatever they go after and win, they count as a small achievement compared with what is to come.

And if they fail in some attempt, they form fresh hopes and so make good the loss. For they alone possess what they have conceived in the very moment of hoping for it, so swiftly do they set about whatever they decide. At all this they toil, with labor and danger, their whole lives long. They enjoy least what they have, because they are always acquiring more. For them a holiday is nothing but doing what needs to be done, and they think untroubled quiet no less a misfortune than laborious business. In short, if anyone said that they were born neither to have any rest themselves nor to let anyone else have any, he would be right.

So let your slowness end here. Now come to the help of the Potidaeans and the rest, as you undertook to do, by invading Attica at once. Otherwise you will abandon men who are your friends and kin to their bitterest enemies, and drive the rest of us in despair to seek some other alliance. In doing so we would commit no wrong, either before the gods by whom we swore or before men who see what is happening. It is not those who turn to others because they have been left alone who break a treaty, but those who fail to help the people they have sworn to support. If you are willing to show zeal, we will stay. It would be impious for us to change sides, and we would not find others more familiar to us. In view of this, deliberate well, and try to lead a Peloponnese no smaller than the one your fathers handed down to you.”

We say that at Marathon we alone stood in the front line of danger against the Persians. When they came the second time, we were not strong enough to defend ourselves on land, so we embarked on our ships with our whole people and fought alongside the others at Salamis. That is what prevented them from sailing against the Peloponnese city by city and laying it waste, since you would have been unable to help one another against a large fleet. The strongest proof of this was given by the Persian king himself. Once he was defeated at sea, he withdrew in haste with the greater part of his army, because his power was no longer what it had been.note

Such was the outcome, and it was made plain that the fate of the Greeks rested on their ships. To this we contributed the three most useful things: the largest number of ships, the most intelligent general, and the most unflinching zeal. Of the four hundred ships, ours were a little less than two-thirds. Our commander was Themistocles, the man chiefly responsible for fighting in the narrows, which most clearly saved the situation; and for this you yourselves honored him above any other foreigner who has visited you. And we showed a zeal far more daring than anyone’s. When no one came to help us by land, and all the rest up to our borders were already enslaved, we resolved to abandon our city and let our property be destroyed. Even so we would not desert the common cause of the allies who remained, or scatter and become useless to them. Instead we embarked on our ships and faced the danger, and we did not resent it that you had not come to our aid first.

So we say that we did you no less good than we received. You came to help from cities that were still inhabited, and with a view to living in them in the future, because you were afraid for yourselves rather than for us. At any rate, while we were still unharmed, you did not appear. We set out from a city that no longer existed and ran risks for one whose survival rested on a slender hope, and so we played our part in saving both you and ourselves. If we had gone over to the Persians earlier out of fear for our land, as others did, or if afterward we had not dared to embark on our ships, believing ourselves ruined, there would have been no point in your fighting at sea, since you had too few ships. Things would have gone smoothly for him, just as he wanted.

You, at any rate, Spartans, lead the cities of the Peloponnese after arranging their affairs to suit your own advantage. If you had stayed on throughout that time and become hated in your leadership, as we did, we are sure you would have become no less oppressive to the allies, and would have been forced either to rule them with a firm hand or to put yourselves in danger. So we too have done nothing remarkable or contrary to human ways if we accepted an empire when it was offered and then refused to give it up, overcome by the three most powerful motives: honor, fear and advantage. Nor were we the first to begin this. It has always been established that the weaker are held down by the stronger. We also thought ourselves worthy of it, and you thought so too, until now, when you calculate your interests and resort to the argument from justice. Yet no one has ever put that argument first and turned aside from taking more when he had the chance to gain something by strength.

Those deserve praise who give way to human nature so far as to rule over others, yet prove more just than their power would allow. At any rate, we think that if others took our place, they would show very clearly whether we are moderate. But in our case even our fairness has, unreasonably, brought us disrepute rather than praise.

People, it seems, are angered more by being wronged than by being coerced. The one feels like being cheated by an equal, the other like being compelled by a superior. At any rate, under the Persians they endured worse treatment than this, yet our empire is thought harsh. That is natural, for the present is always oppressive to subjects. As for you, if you overthrew us and ruled in our place, you would soon lose the goodwill you have gained through fear of us, if you mean to behave now as you showed you would during your brief leadership against the Persians. For the customs you keep among yourselves do not mix with those of others. And besides, each of you, when he goes abroad, follows neither these nor the customs the rest of Greece observes.

But these are men whose land is far away, who are, moreover, most experienced at sea and excellently equipped in every other respect. They have wealth, private and public, ships, horses, arms, and a population larger than in any other single Greek territory, and on top of that they have many allies paying tribute. How can we lightly take up war against them, and on what can we rely to rush into it unprepared? On our ships? But there we are weaker. And if we train and prepare to match them, it will take time. On our money, then? But there we fall even further short. We have none in the public treasury, and we do not readily contribute it from our private means.

Perhaps someone might take heart from the fact that we surpass them in arms and in numbers, so that we can invade and ravage their land. But they have plenty of other land that they rule, and they will bring in what they need by sea. If, on the other hand, we try to make their allies revolt, we will have to support them with ships as well, since most of them are islanders. So what kind of war will ours be? Unless we either defeat them at sea or take away the revenues from which they maintain their navy, we will get the worst of it. And then we cannot even make peace honorably, especially if we are thought to have started the quarrel. Let us not, above all, be carried away by the hope that the war will soon be over if we ravage their land. I fear rather that we may leave it to our children as well, so unlikely is it that the Athenians, with their pride, will become slaves to their land or be cowed by war like men without experience.

Perhaps, when they see our preparations, and our words giving signals to match, they would be more inclined to yield, since their land would still be unravaged and they would be deliberating about goods they still have and that have not yet been destroyed. Do not think of their land as anything but a hostage in our hands, all the more valuable the better it is cultivated. We should spare it as long as possible, and not drive them to desperation and so make them harder to subdue. If we rush in unprepared, spurred on by the allies’ grievances, and ravage it, consider whether we will not bring greater disgrace and greater difficulty on the Peloponnese. Grievances, whether of cities or of individuals, can be settled. But when all of us together have taken up a war for the sake of particular interests, a war whose course no one can know, it is not easy to end it honorably.

And do not be ashamed of the slowness and delay for which they criticize us most. If you hurry, you will be slower to finish, because you began unprepared; and besides, the city we live in has always been free and held in the highest esteem. This quality, more than anything, can be called a sensible self-control. Because of it, we alone do not grow insolent in success, and we give way to misfortune less than others do. When people urge us toward dangers with praise, against our own judgment, we are not carried away by the pleasure of it. And if anyone tries to goad us with accusations, we are none the more persuaded for being annoyed.

Our discipline makes us both warlike and wise in counsel. We are warlike because a sense of shame has the largest share in self-control, and courage the largest share in a sense of shame. We are wise in counsel because we are brought up too unlearned to look down on the laws, and with too much strictness and self-control to disobey them. We are not trained to be overclever in useless matters, finding fine fault in word with the enemy’s preparations and then failing to match it in deed when we march against them. We are taught to think that our neighbors’ plans are much like our own, and that the chances that befall us cannot be settled by argument. In deed, we always prepare against our opponents on the assumption that their plans are sound; we must not base our hopes on the expectation that they will blunder, but on our own careful forethought. We should not think that one man differs much from another: the best is he who is brought up under the strictest necessity.

Others may have plenty of money and ships and horses, but we have good allies, and they must not be handed over to the Athenians. Nor is this to be settled by lawsuits and words, when it is not in word that our allies are being harmed; they must be avenged, quickly and with all our strength. And let no one lecture us that we ought to deliberate when we are being wronged; it is rather those who intend to do wrong who should deliberate for a long time. So vote for war, Spartans, as befits Sparta. Do not let the Athenians grow any greater, and let us not betray our allies; but with the gods’ help let us march against those who do wrong.”

They then called in the allies and told them that in their own view the Athenians were in the wrong, but that they wished to summon all the allies together and put the matter to a vote, so that they might deliberate in common and make war, if that was decided. Having accomplished this, the allies went home, and later so did the Athenian envoys, once they had done the business they had come for. This decision of the assembly, that the treaty had been broken, was made in the fourteenth year of the Thirty Years’ Peace, which had been concluded after the affair in Euboea.note

The Spartans voted that the treaty had been broken and that they must go to war, not so much because they were persuaded by their allies’ arguments as because they feared that the Athenians might become still more powerful, seeing that most of Greece was already in their hands.

As for the Athenian people as a body, once the foreigners had left their land, they immediately began bringing back their children, their wives and what remained of their household goods from the places where they had put them for safety, and they set about rebuilding their city and its walls. Only short stretches of the circuit wall were still standing, and most of the houses had fallen; a few survived, in which the leading Persians themselves had been quartered.note

On Themistocles’ advice the Athenians answered the Spartans, after they had said this, that they would send envoys to them about what they proposed, and sent them away at once. Themistocles told them to send him to Sparta as quickly as possible; they were to choose other envoys to go with him, but not to send them off at once, and to hold them back until they had raised the wall high enough to fight from, at the least height that was strictly necessary. Everyone in the city, the whole population [men, women and children], was to work on the wall, sparing no building, private or public, that might be of any use for the work, but pulling everything down.

After giving these instructions, and hinting that he himself would handle the rest at Sparta, he left. When he arrived in Sparta he did not go before the authorities, but kept putting it off and making excuses. Whenever any of those in office asked him why he did not come before the government, he said he was waiting for his fellow envoys: they had been left behind because of some business, but he expected them to arrive soon and was surprised they were not there yet.

Hearing this, they believed Themistocles because of their friendship for him. But when others arrived and stated plainly that the wall was being built and was already rising, they did not see how they could disbelieve it. Realizing this, he told them not to be misled by reports, but rather to send men of their own, men of good character who would look and report back faithfully. So they sent them, and Themistocles sent word secretly to the Athenians about them, telling them to detain the men as unobtrusively as possible and not to let them go until he and his colleagues had returned. (By now his fellow envoys, Abronichus son of Lysicles and Aristides son of Lysimachus, had joined him, with the news that the wall was high enough.) For he was afraid that the Spartans, once they heard the plain truth, would not let them go.

So the Athenians detained the envoys, as they had been instructed, and Themistocles went before the Spartans and now at last said openly that his city had already been walled, enough to protect its inhabitants. If the Spartans or their allies wished to send an embassy to them, they should come in future as to people who could judge both what was in their own interest and what was in the common interest.

For when they had decided it was better to abandon their city and take to their ships, he said, they had made that bold decision without the Spartans; and in everything they had deliberated on together with them, they had shown themselves second to none in judgment. So now too they thought it better for their city to have a wall, and that this would be more advantageous both for their own citizens and for all the allies; for it was impossible to offer any comparable or equal counsel for the common good without comparable strength behind it. Either, then, he said, all the members of the alliance must be without walls, or they must accept that this step too was right.

When the Spartans heard this, they showed no open anger at the Athenians. They had sent the embassy, so they claimed, not to stop them but to offer advice for the common good; and besides, at that time they were on the friendliest terms with the Athenians because of the zeal they had shown against the Persians. But they were secretly vexed at failing to get what they wanted. And the envoys on both sides went home without any formal complaint.

Themistocles also persuaded them to finish building the Piraeus. (It had been begun earlier, during the year in which he held office at Athens.) He thought the site a fine one, with its three natural harbors, and he thought that now they had become a seafaring people this would greatly help them to gain power. (He was, in fact, the first who dared to say that they must hold on to the sea.) And so he at once began helping to lay the foundations of the empire. On his plan they built the wall to the thickness that can still be seen around the Piraeus: two wagons, passing each other in opposite directions, brought up the stones along it. Inside there was neither rubble nor clay, but large stones fitted together and cut square, bound to one another on the outer face with iron clamps and lead.note

The wall was completed to about half the height he intended. He wanted to ward off enemy attacks by its size and thickness, and he thought that a guard of a few men, the least fit for service, would be enough, while the rest would man the ships. For he was devoted above all to the ships, having seen, I think, that for the King’s forces an approach by sea was easier than one by land. He considered the Piraeus more useful than the upper city, and he often advised the Athenians, if they were ever overpowered on land, to go down to it and resist all comers with their ships. So it was in this way that the Athenians got their walls and made their other preparations, immediately after the Persian withdrawal.

But by now he was behaving violently, and the other Greeks resented it, not least the Ionians and those who had recently been freed from the King. They went to the Athenians and asked them to become their leaders, on the grounds of kinship, and not to give way to Pausanias if he used force anywhere. The Athenians accepted these proposals and turned their attention to the matter, meaning not to stand by, and to settle everything else as seemed best to them. Meanwhile the Spartans recalled Pausanias to examine him about what they were hearing; for the Greeks who came to Sparta accused him of much wrongdoing, and his conduct seemed more an imitation of tyranny than a generalship. It so happened that he was recalled at the same moment that the allies, out of hatred for him, went over to the Athenians—all except the soldiers from the Peloponnese.

When he reached Sparta he was called to account for wrongs done privately to individuals, but acquitted on the most serious charges. One of the chief charges against him was collaborating with the Persians, and it seemed very clearly proved. They did not send him out again as commander, but sent Dorcis and some others with him, with a force of no great size; but the allies would no longer grant them the leadership. Realizing this, they went home, and afterward the Spartans sent no others. They were afraid that those who went abroad would be corrupted, as they had seen in Pausanias’ case; they also wanted to be rid of the Persian War, and they thought the Athenians capable of leading and, at that time, well disposed toward themselves.

Leading allies who were at first independent and deliberated in common meetings, the Athenians undertook the following actions, in war and in the management of affairs, between the Persian War and this one: actions against the Persians, against their own allies when they rebelled, and against those Peloponnesians with whom they came into conflict on each occasion. I have written about these events and made this digression from my account for the following reason: this period was left out by all my predecessors, who wrote either the history of Greece before the Persian Wars or of the Persian Wars themselves; and Hellanicus, the one who did touch on these events in his history of Attica, treated them briefly and with inaccurate chronology. At the same time, it shows how the Athenian empire came to be established.note

There were various causes of the revolts, the greatest being failures to pay tribute or supply ships, and desertion from service where it occurred. For the Athenians were strict in exacting what was due and made themselves oppressive, applying compulsion to people who were neither used to hardship nor willing to endure it. In other ways too the Athenians were no longer as welcome as rulers as they had been: they did not take part in campaigns on equal terms, and it was easy for them to bring rebels back into subjection. For this the allies themselves were responsible. Because of this reluctance to go on campaign, most of them, so as not to be away from home, had arranged to pay their due share in money instead of ships. So the Athenian navy grew on the money they contributed, while they themselves, whenever they revolted, found themselves unprepared and inexperienced for war.

The Athenians sailed against Thasos with a fleet, won a sea battle and landed on the island. At about the same time they sent ten thousand settlers, from among themselves and their allies, to the Strymon, to found a settlement at the place then called Nine Ways, now Amphipolis. They themselves gained control of Nine Ways, which the Edonians held; but when they advanced into the interior of Thrace they were destroyed at Drabescus in Edonian territory by the Thracians as a whole, who regarded the founding of the place [Nine Ways] as an act of hostility.note

The Thasians, defeated in battle and under siege, appealed to the Spartans and urged them to come to their aid by invading Attica. The Spartans promised to do so, without the Athenians’ knowledge, and meant to, but they were prevented by the earthquake that occurred. During it their helots, and among the perioeci, the “dwellers round about,” the people of Thuria and Aethaea, revolted and went to Ithome. Most of the helots were descendants of the old Messenians who had been enslaved long before, which is why they were all called Messenians. So the Spartans had a war on their hands against those on Ithome, while the Thasians, in the third year of the siege, came to terms with the Athenians: they pulled down their wall and handed over their ships, agreed to pay at once whatever money was due and to keep paying in future, and gave up their mainland possessions and the mine.note

When the place was not taken by storm, the Spartans grew afraid of the Athenians’ daring and their appetite for innovation. They also regarded them as men of a different stock, and feared that if they stayed on they might be won over by the rebels on Ithome and start some revolutionary move. So they sent them away, alone of the allies. They did not reveal their suspicion but said only that they had no further need of them. The Athenians, however, realized that they were being dismissed not for the more respectable reason given but because some suspicion had arisen. They took it hard and felt they did not deserve such treatment from the Spartans. As soon as they had withdrawn, they abandoned the alliance they had made with the Spartans against the Persians and became allies of the Argives, the Spartans’ enemies. At the same time both Athens and Argos concluded the same oaths and alliance with the Thessalians.

The Megarians also broke away from the Spartans and came over to the Athenians as allies, because the Corinthians were pressing them hard in a war over boundary land. So the Athenians gained Megara and Pegae. They built the Megarians their long walls from the city to Nisaea and garrisoned them themselves. It was not least from this that the Corinthians’ violent hatred of the Athenians first began.note

Then the Peloponnesians, wanting to help the Aeginetans, sent across to Aegina three hundred hoplites who had earlier been serving as auxiliaries with the Corinthians and Epidaurians. The Corinthians and their allies seized the heights of Geraneia and came down into the Megarid. They thought the Athenians would be unable to help the Megarians, with large forces away both in Aegina and in Egypt, and that if they did come to help, they would have to withdraw from Aegina. The Athenians, however, did not move their army at Aegina. Instead, from those left behind in the city, the oldest and the youngest went to Megara with Myronides in command.note

A battle was fought against the Corinthians that was evenly matched, and the two sides drew apart, each thinking it had not had the worse of the action. The Athenians had in fact had rather the better of it, and when the Corinthians had gone they set up a trophy. The Corinthians, taunted by the older men in their city, made their preparations and came back about twelve days later. They set up a trophy of their own, claiming that they too had won. The Athenians sallied out from Megara, killed the men setting up the trophy, and engaged the rest and defeated them.

The defeated men retreated. A considerable part of them, hard pressed and missing their way, blundered into a piece of private land that happened to be surrounded by a great ditch and had no way out. When the Athenians realized this, they blocked them in at the front with their hoplites, posted their light troops in a ring all round, and stoned to death everyone who had gone in. This was a great disaster for the Corinthians. The main body of their army went back home.

Geraneia was hard to cross and was always guarded by the Athenians, and the Spartans now learned that the Athenians meant to stop them that way too. So they decided to wait in Boeotia and consider how they could get across most safely. Partly, too, certain Athenians were secretly inviting them in. These men hoped to put an end to the democracy and to the building of the long walls. The Athenians marched out against them in full force, together with a thousand Argives and contingents from each of the other allies, fourteen thousand men in all. They marched against them believing the Spartans were at a loss how to get through, and partly also because they suspected a plot to overthrow the democracy. Thessalian cavalry also came to the Athenians under the terms of the alliance, but in the action they went over to the Spartans.

A battle was fought at Tanagra in Boeotia. The Spartans and their allies won, and there was heavy slaughter on both sides. The Spartans went into the Megarid, cut down the trees, and returned home through Geraneia and the Isthmus. On the sixty-second day after the battle the Athenians marched against the Boeotians with Myronides in command. They defeated the Boeotians in a battle at Oenophyta and became masters of Boeotia and Phocis. They pulled down the wall of Tanagra and took a hundred of the richest men of the Opuntian Locrians as hostages. They also completed their own long walls.

After this the Aeginetans also came to terms with the Athenians. They pulled down their walls, surrendered their ships, and accepted an assessment of tribute for the future. The Athenians also sailed round the Peloponnese with Tolmides son of Tolmaeus in command. They burned the Spartans’ dockyard, took Chalcis, a city belonging to the Corinthians, and in a landing on Sicyonian territory defeated the Sicyonians in battle.

He came by land, defeated the Egyptians and their allies in battle, and drove the Greeks out of Memphis. Finally he shut them up on the island of Prosopitis and besieged them there for a year and six months. In the end he drained the canal and diverted the water elsewhere, which left their ships high and dry and turned most of the island into mainland. Then he crossed over and took the island on foot.

So the Greek enterprise came to ruin after six years of war. A few out of many made their way through Libya to Cyrene and were saved, but most perished. Egypt came back under the King, except for Amyrtaeus, the king in the marshes. They could not capture him because of the size of the marsh, and besides, the marsh-dwellers are the best fighters among the Egyptians. Inaros, king of the Libyans, who had been behind the whole Egyptian venture, was betrayed, captured and impaled.

Fifty triremes from Athens and the rest of the alliance, sailing to Egypt as a relief force, put in at the Mendesian mouth of the Nile knowing nothing of what had happened. Infantry attacked them from the land and a Phoenician fleet from the sea. Most of their ships were destroyed, and the smaller part escaped home. So ended the great expedition of the Athenians and their allies to Egypt.

Not long after withdrawing from Euboea, they made the Thirty Years’ Peace with the Spartans and their allies. Under it they gave back Nisaea, Pegae, Troezen and Achaea, for these were the Peloponnesian places the Athenians held.note

Some of the Samians, however, had not stayed but fled to the mainland. They made an alliance with the most powerful men in the city and with Pissuthnes son of Hystaspes, who then held Sardis. They gathered about seven hundred mercenaries and crossed over to Samos by night. First they rose against the democracy and overpowered most of its supporters. Then they stole their own hostages away from Lemnos and revolted. They handed over the Athenian garrison and the Athenian officials who were among them to Pissuthnes, and at once began preparing to march against Miletus. The Byzantines joined them in the revolt.note

Later forty ships from Athens and twenty-five from Chios and Lesbos came to reinforce them. They landed, and since they had the upper hand on land, they besieged the city with three walls and blockaded it from the sea at the same time. Pericles then took sixty of the blockading ships and went off in haste toward Caunus and Caria, because word had come that a Phoenician fleet was sailing against them. Stesagoras and others had also gone from Samos with five ships to meet the Phoenicians.

Meanwhile the Samians made a sudden sortie and fell on the unfortified camp. They destroyed the guard ships and defeated in a sea battle the ships that put out against them. For about fourteen days they controlled the sea off their own coast and brought in and carried out whatever they wanted. But when Pericles returned, his ships shut them in again. Later further reinforcements came from Athens, forty ships with Thucydides, Hagnon and Phormio and twenty with Tlepolemus and Anticles, and thirty more came from Chios and Lesbos. The Samians fought a brief sea battle, but they were unable to hold out. In the ninth month they were starved into surrender and came to terms. They pulled down their wall, gave hostages, surrendered their ships, and agreed to repay the costs of the war in installments. The Byzantines also agreed to be subjects as before.note

At that point the Spartans found it no longer bearable. They decided that they must set to work with all their energy and destroy the Athenians’ strength, if they could, by undertaking this war. The Spartans themselves had already decided that the treaty had been broken and that the Athenians were doing wrong. But they sent to Delphi and asked the god whether it would be better for them to go to war. He answered them, so it is said, that if they fought with all their might they would win, and he said that he himself would take their part, whether called upon or not.

They summoned their allies once more, intending to put to them the vote on whether to go to war. The envoys came from the alliance and a congress was held. The others said what they wished, most of them accusing the Athenians and demanding that the war go ahead. Before this the Corinthians had gone to each of the cities in turn and begged them privately to vote for war, because they were afraid that Potidaea would be destroyed before anything was done. They were present this time too, and they came forward last and spoke as follows:

That is exactly why they must not hesitate to exchange peace for war. It is the mark of prudent men to keep quiet if they are not wronged. But it is the mark of brave men, when they are wronged, to go from peace to war, and then, when a good opportunity offers, to come to terms again after war. They are neither carried away by success in war nor willing to suffer wrong because they enjoy the quiet of peace. The man who hesitates for the sake of pleasure would very quickly, if he kept quiet, be robbed of the delightful ease that makes him hesitate. And the man who presses too far on the strength of success in war has failed to reflect that he is being carried away by a confidence that cannot be trusted. Many plans badly conceived have succeeded because the enemy turned out to be even more ill-advised. Even more plans that seemed well thought out have ended, on the contrary, in disgrace. For no one carries out a plan in action with the same confidence with which he conceives it. We form our opinions in safety, but when it comes to action, fear makes us fall short.

In all likelihood a single naval victory will finish them. If they hold out, we too will train at seamanship over a longer period, and once we have brought our skill up to their level, we will surely be their superiors in courage. For the good that we have by nature they could never acquire by teaching, while the advantage they have in skill we can eliminate by practice. As for the money to pay for all this, we will contribute it. It would be outrageous if their allies never refuse to pay for their own enslavement, while we, it seems, will not spend money to punish our enemies and save ourselves at the same time, and to avoid having that very money taken from us by them and used to do us harm.

We have other ways of waging the war as well. We can bring about the revolt of their allies, which above all means stripping them of the revenues on which their strength depends. We can build a fortified post in their territory. And there are other measures that no one could foresee now. For war is the last thing to proceed on fixed terms. It mostly devises its own means to meet whatever turns up. In war the man who deals with it calmly stands on firmer ground, while the man who loses his temper over it suffers falls no smaller.

In that case we would seem either to deserve our suffering or to endure it out of cowardice, and to prove ourselves worse than our fathers, who freed Greece. We are not even securing that freedom for ourselves. We allow a city to establish itself as a tyrant, while we think it right to overthrow sole rulers in individual cities. And we do not see how this conduct can be free of the three greatest failings: lack of sense, softness, or negligence. You surely have not escaped these only to fall into the contempt for the enemy that has ruined so many. Because it trips up so many, that contempt has been renamed with the opposite name, senselessness.note

Why should we blame what has happened in the past any longer than serves the present? As for what lies ahead, you must take on further hardship to deal with the present situation. It is your ancestral way to win excellence through toil. You must not change that custom just because you now have a slight advantage in wealth and resources, for it is not right that what was won in poverty should be lost in plenty. Instead you should go into the war with confidence, for many reasons. The god has given his oracle and has promised to help in person, and all the rest of Greece will join in the struggle, partly from fear and partly for advantage. Nor will you be the first to break the treaty, since the god, in bidding you to go to war, considers it already violated. Rather, you will be coming to the aid of a treaty that has been wronged. For a treaty is broken not by those who defend themselves but by those who attack first.

No, men of the alliance. Recognize that necessity has come upon you, and that this is also the best advice. Vote for war. Do not fear the immediate danger, but long for the more lasting peace that will come from it. For peace is made more secure by war, while refusing war for the sake of quiet is not equally free of danger. Let us consider that the city which has set itself up as a tyrant in Greece has been set up against all of us alike, ruling some already and planning to rule others. Let us attack it and bring it to heel, so that we ourselves may live safely from now on and may free the Greeks who are now enslaved.” Such was the speech of the Corinthians.

During this time they kept sending embassies to the Athenians with complaints, so that they would have the strongest possible pretext for war if the Athenians paid no attention.

Whether the greatest festival meant was in Attica or somewhere else was something he did not stop to consider, and the oracle did not make it clear. The Athenians too have a festival, the Diasia, which is called the greatest festival of Zeus Meilichius. It is held outside the city, and at it the whole people make many offerings, not animal victims but pure offerings of a local kind. Thinking he had understood correctly, Cylon put his plan into action. When the Athenians learned of it, they came in from the countryside in full force against them, sat down before the Acropolis and besieged it.note

As time went on, most of the Athenians grew weary of the siege and went away. They entrusted the guard to the nine archons, with full powers to settle everything as they judged best; at that time the nine archons handled most public business. Cylon and those besieged with him were in a bad way for lack of food and water. Cylon and his brother escaped. The rest, hard pressed, with some actually dying of hunger, sat down as suppliants at the altar on the Acropolis.note

The Athenians who had been entrusted with the guard, seeing them dying in the sanctuary, made them get up on condition that they would do them no harm, then led them away and killed them. Some who had seated themselves at the altars of the Venerable Goddesses as they went past were also put to death there. Because of this, the killers and their descendants were called accursed and offenders against the goddess. The Athenians drove these accursed people out, and later Cleomenes the Spartan also drove them out, with the help of one side in an Athenian civil conflict. They expelled the living and dug up the bones of the dead and threw them out. They did, however, return later, and their family is still in the city.note

It was this curse, then, that the Spartans told the Athenians to drive out, supposedly to avenge the gods first of all. In fact they knew that Pericles son of Xanthippus was connected with it on his mother’s side, and they thought that if he were banished, their dealings with the Athenians would go more easily for them. They did not so much expect him actually to suffer this as to bring discredit on him in the eyes of the city, as though the war would be partly due to his family’s misfortune. For as the most powerful man of his time and the leader of the state, he opposed the Spartans in everything. He would not allow concessions, but kept urging the Athenians on to war.

This was how he first laid up a service with the King and set the whole affair in motion. On his earlier stay, after he returned from Cyprus, he had captured Byzantium. It was held by the Persians, and some connections and kinsmen of the King were captured there. On this occasion he sent the prisoners he had taken back to the King without the knowledge of the other allies, giving out that they had escaped from him. He managed this with the help of Gongylus of Eretria, to whom he had entrusted Byzantium and the prisoners.

He also sent Gongylus to take a letter to the King. In it was written the following, as was discovered later: “Pausanias, the leader of Sparta, wishing to do you a favor, sends you back these men whom he captured by the spear. I propose, if you also approve, to marry your daughter and to make Sparta and the rest of Greece subject to you. I believe I am able to do this with you in counsel with me. So if any of this pleases you, send a trustworthy man to the coast, through whom we will carry on our communications from now on.”

That was all the writing revealed. Xerxes was pleased with the letter. He sent Artabazus son of Pharnaces down to the coast, with orders to take over the satrapy of Dascylium, replacing Megabates, who had governed it before. He gave him a letter in reply, to send across to Pausanias at Byzantium as quickly as possible and to show him the seal. If Pausanias gave him any instructions about his own affairs, Artabazus was to carry them out as well and as faithfully as he could. When he arrived, Artabazus did everything else as he had been told and sent the letter across. The reply read as follows: “Thus says King Xerxes to Pausanias.note

For the men you saved for me from Byzantium across the sea, a benefaction stands to your credit in our house, recorded forever, and I am pleased with the words that come from you. Let neither night nor day stop you so that you slacken in doing any of the things you promise me. Do not be held back by the expense of gold and silver, or by the size of the army, if one is needed anywhere. With Artabazus, a good man whom I have sent to you, go ahead confidently with my affairs and yours, so that they may turn out most honorably and best for both of us.”

When Pausanias received this letter, he was already held in great esteem by the Greeks for his leadership at Plataea, but now he grew far more puffed up and could no longer live in the established manner. He would go out of Byzantium dressed in Persian clothes. As he traveled through Thrace, Persians and Egyptians escorted him as a bodyguard. He had a Persian table set before him. He could not conceal his intentions, but by small actions revealed in advance what he meant to do on a grander scale later. He made himself hard to approach and showed such a harsh temper to everyone alike that no one could come near him. This was not the least of the reasons why the alliance went over to the Athenians.note

Pausanias, wanting to arouse as little suspicion as possible and confident that he could dispose of the accusation with money, returned to Sparta a second time. At first he was thrown into prison by the ephors (the ephors have the right to do this even to the king). Later he managed to get himself released and offered to stand trial before anyone who wanted to bring charges against him.

The Spartiates, both his personal enemies and the city as a whole, had no clear evidence on which they could rely in punishing a man who was of the royal family and held high office at the time; he was acting as regent for Pleistarchus son of Leonidas, his cousin, who was king and still young. But by his disregard for the laws and his imitation of foreign ways he gave rise to many suspicions that he did not wish to be on a level with things as they stood. They examined the rest of his conduct, to see whether he had departed anywhere from the established customs. They recalled in particular that he had once seen fit to have the following couplet inscribed, on his own account, on the tripod at Delphi that the Greeks had dedicated as first fruits of the spoils taken from the Persians: “Leader of the Greeks, when he destroyed the army of the Persians, Pausanias dedicated this memorial to Phoebus.”note

The Spartans had this couplet chiseled off the tripod immediately at the time, and they inscribed by name all the cities that had joined in defeating the Persians and set up the offering. Even then, however, it was considered an offense on Pausanias’ part, and now that he was in this position, it looked all the more in keeping with his present intentions. They also learned that he was intriguing with the helots, and this was true: he was promising them freedom and citizenship if they would rise up with him and help him carry the whole plan through.

But even so, they did not see fit to take any drastic measures against him on the word of certain helot informers. They kept to the practice they usually follow among themselves: not to be quick to take an irreversible decision about a Spartiate without indisputable proof. Finally, so it is said, the man who was to carry the last letters to Artabazus for the King turned informer. He was a man from Argilus who had once been Pausanias’ beloved and was the man he trusted most. He had grown afraid when it occurred to him that none of the messengers before him had ever come back. So he counterfeited the seal, so that Pausanias would not find out if his suspicion proved mistaken, or if Pausanias asked to alter something in the letters, and he opened them. Since he had suspected that some such instruction had been added, he found written in them that he himself was to be killed.note

When he showed the ephors the letter, they were more convinced, but they still wanted to hear something from Pausanias’ own lips. So by arrangement the man went to Taenarum as a suppliant. There he put up a hut divided in two by a partition, and he hid some of the ephors inside it. Pausanias came to him and asked the reason for his supplication, and the ephors heard everything clearly. The man reproached Pausanias with what had been written about him and set out the rest point by point. He had never once exposed Pausanias to danger in his errands to the King, and yet he had been honored, on a level with the mass of servants, with death. Pausanias admitted these very things and urged him not to be angry about the present situation. He gave him a pledge of safety if he left the sanctuary, and asked him to set off as quickly as possible and not to obstruct the business in hand.

After hearing every detail, the ephors left for the time being. Now that they knew for certain, they prepared to arrest him in the city. It is said that when he was about to be arrested in the street, he saw the face of one of the ephors as he came toward him and realized what he was coming for. Another ephor, out of goodwill, gave him a covert nod and let him know, so he ran to the sanctuary of the goddess of the Bronze House and took refuge there before they could reach him, for the precinct was close by. He went into a small building that belonged to the sanctuary, so as not to suffer out in the open, and stayed there quietly. For the moment his pursuers were too late. Afterwards they took the roof off the building, waited until he was inside, shut him in and walled up the doors. Then they sat down around it and starved him out, as if in a siege.note

When he was about to breathe his last, just as he was, inside the building, they saw it and carried him out of the sanctuary while he was still breathing, and once he had been brought out he died at once. They intended to throw him into the Caeadas [, where they throw criminals], but then they decided to bury him somewhere nearby. Later, however, the god at Delphi instructed the Spartans by oracle to move his tomb to the place where he had died. He now lies in the forecourt of the sanctuary, as the inscription on some stone slabs shows. The oracle also declared that what they had done was a curse upon them, and that they must give back two bodies in place of one to the goddess of the Bronze House. So they had two bronze statues made and dedicated them as a substitute for Pausanias.note

The Athenians, on the grounds that the god too had judged it a curse, made a counter-demand that the Spartans drive out this curse.

But Themistocles learned of it in advance and fled from the Peloponnese to Corcyra, since he was a benefactor of the Corcyraeans. When they said they were afraid to keep him and so make enemies of the Spartans and the Athenians, they took him across to the mainland opposite. He was pursued by the men assigned to the task, who kept finding out which way he was going. At one point of desperate difficulty he was forced to stop with Admetus, king of the Molossians, who was no friend of his. Admetus happened not to be at home. Themistocles became a suppliant of his wife, and she told him to take their child and sit down at the hearth.note

When Admetus came back not long afterward, Themistocles told him who he was. He asked Admetus not to take vengeance on him as an exile, even if he himself had perhaps opposed some request Admetus had made of the Athenians. In his present state, he said, he could be harmed even by someone far weaker than Admetus, whereas it was noble to take vengeance on equals on equal terms. Besides, he himself had opposed Admetus over a mere request, not over saving his life. Admetus, by contrast, if he gave him up, would be depriving him of the means of saving his life. Here he told him who was pursuing him and why.

On hearing this, Admetus raised him up, together with his own son, whom Themistocles had been holding as he sat. This was the most solemn form of supplication. Not long afterward the Spartans and Athenians came and argued at length, but Admetus did not give him up. Themistocles wanted to go to the King, so Admetus sent him overland to the other sea, to Pydna, the city of Alexander. There he found a merchant ship putting out for Ionia. He went on board, and a storm carried the ship to the Athenian camp that was besieging Naxos.note

Afraid—for no one on board knew who he was—he told the ship’s master who he was and why he was in flight. He said that if the master did not save him, he would claim the man was carrying him because he had been bribed. Their safety, he said, lay in no one leaving the ship until they could sail on, and if the master did as he asked, he would repay the favor as it deserved. The master did so. He rode at anchor for a day and a night off the camp, and eventually reached Ephesus. Themistocles rewarded him with a gift of money, since later he received money from his friends in Athens and from Argos, where funds had been secretly deposited for him. Then he traveled inland with one of the Persians from the coast and sent a letter up to King Artaxerxes, son of Xerxes, who had recently come to the throne.

The letter said: “I, Themistocles, have come to you. Of all the Greeks I did your house the most harm for as long as I was forced to defend myself against your father’s invasion. But I did it far more good when his withdrawal was under way, at a time when I was safe and he was in danger. A kindness is owed to me”—here he wrote of the advance message from Salamis about the withdrawal, and of the bridges not being broken up at that time, thanks to him, which was a false claim—“and now I am here, able to do you great services, pursued by the Greeks because of my friendship for you. I wish to wait a year and then explain to you myself what I have come about.”note

The King, it is said, admired his intention and told him to do so. During the time he waited, Themistocles learned as much of the Persian language and of the customs of the country as he could. When he arrived after the year was up, he became a great man at the King’s court, greater than any Greek before him. This was partly because of the standing he already had, and partly because of the hope he held out to the King of enslaving the Greek world. Above all, though, it was because he gave proof of his ability and showed himself to be intelligent.

He fell ill and died. Some, however, say that he took poison and died by his own choice, believing it impossible to carry out what he had promised the King. There is a monument to him in the marketplace of Magnesia in Asia. He governed that region, for the King had given him Magnesia for his bread, which brought in fifty talents a year, Lampsacus for his wine (it was considered the richest in wine of any place at that time), and Myus for the rest of his table. His relatives say that his bones were brought home at his own request and buried in Attica without the Athenians’ knowledge. It was not lawful to bury him there, since he was in exile for treason. So ended the story of Pausanias the Spartan and Themistocles the Athenian, the most brilliant Greeks of their time.

Finally the last envoys came from Sparta: Ramphias, Melesippus and Agesander. They said nothing of what had usually been said before, only this: “The Spartans want peace, and there would be peace if you left the Greeks independent.” The Athenians held an assembly and opened the question for debate among themselves. They decided to deliberate once and for all on every issue and then give their answer. Many others came forward and spoke on both sides, some arguing that they must go to war, others that the decree should not stand in the way of peace and should be revoked. Then Pericles son of Xanthippus came forward. He was the leading man in Athens at that time and the most able in both speech and action, and he gave the following advice:

None of you should think we would be going to war over a trifle if we refused to revoke the Megarian decree. They put this forward more than anything else, saying that if it were revoked there would be no war. Do not leave yourselves with the nagging reproach that you went to war over something small. For this ‘trifle’ contains the whole confirmation and test of your resolve. If you give in to them, you will at once be ordered to do something greater, since they will think you obeyed in this out of fear as well. But if you refuse firmly, you will make it clear to them that they must deal with you as equals.

Make up your minds, then, here and now. Either submit before you suffer any harm, or, if we are to go to war, as I think the better course, resolve not to give way on any pretext, great or small, and not to hold what we have acquired in fear. When equals impose a claim on their neighbors before any arbitration, the greatest claim and the smallest alike amount to the same enslavement.

Men who work their own land are readier to fight with their bodies than with their money. They trust that they may come through the dangers alive, but they are not sure they will not run out of money first, especially if the war drags on longer than they expect, as it probably will. In a single battle the Peloponnesians and their allies can hold their own against all the Greeks together. But they cannot wage war against forces organized differently from their own. They have no single council chamber to carry out any measure quickly on the spot. They all have an equal vote and are not of the same stock, so each of them presses his own interests. From this, nothing ever tends to get done.

Some want to take as much revenge on someone as possible, while others want their own property damaged as little as possible. They meet only at long intervals, and they give a small part of that time to any common business and the larger part to their own affairs. Each thinks his own neglect will do no harm and that it is somebody else’s job to look ahead on his behalf. So, because each of them privately holds the same idea, the common cause is ruined wholesale without anyone noticing.

Becoming experts at sea will not come easily to them. Even you, who have been practicing it ever since the Persian Wars, have not yet mastered it completely. So how could men who are farmers and not seafarers achieve anything worth mentioning, especially when they will not even be allowed to practice, because we will always be blockading them with many ships? Against a few blockading ships they might take a risk, letting their numbers embolden their ignorance. But when many ships keep them in, they will stay quiet, and for lack of practice they will become less skilled and, for that very reason, more hesitant. Seamanship is a matter of skill, like anything else. It cannot be practiced as a sideline when the chance arises. On the contrary, it leaves no room for anything else as a sideline.

As it is, we must think of ourselves as being as close to islanders as possible. We must give up our land and houses and keep guard over the sea and the city. We must not let anger over them drive us into a decisive battle with the Peloponnesians, who far outnumber us. If we win, we will have to fight again against just as many. If we fail, we lose our allies as well, and they are the source of our strength, for they will not keep quiet once we are no longer able to march against them. And we must not lament the loss of houses and land, but the loss of lives, for it is not these things that win men, but men who win these things. If I thought I could persuade you, I would urge you to go out and lay them waste yourselves, and show the Peloponnesians that you will not submit for the sake of these things, at any rate.

This answer is both just and worthy of this city. But you must understand that war is unavoidable, and the more willingly we accept it, the less pressing we will find our enemies. You must also understand that the greatest honors, for city and individual alike, come out of the greatest dangers. Our fathers, at any rate, stood up to the Persians, though they did not start from resources like ours and even abandoned what they had. More by judgment than by chance, and with daring greater than their power, they drove back the foreign invader and brought our affairs to their present height. We must not fall short of them. We must defend ourselves against our enemies in every way, and try to hand on what we have to those who come after us undiminished.”

These were the grievances and disputes between the two sides before the war, beginning right from the events at Epidamnus and Corcyra. Even so, they kept up contact while these went on and visited each other without heralds, though not without suspicion. For what was happening amounted to a breaking of the treaty and a pretext for war.note

They had been invited in, and the gates opened for them, by men of Plataea: Naucleides and his associates. For the sake of their own power, these men wanted to kill those citizens who opposed them and bring the city over to Thebes. They arranged this through Eurymachus son of Leontiades, a very powerful man at Thebes. The Thebans foresaw that the war was coming, and they wanted to seize Plataea, which had always been at odds with them, while it was still peacetime and the war had not yet openly broken out. That is also why they found it easier to get in unnoticed: no guard had been posted.

They grounded their arms in the marketplace. But they did not do as the men who had brought them in urged, which was to set to work at once and go for the houses of their enemies. Instead they decided to make conciliatory proclamations and to bring the city round to an agreement and friendship. The herald announced that anyone who wished to be an ally according to the ancestral tradition of all the Boeotians should come and ground his arms beside them. They thought that in this way the city would easily come over to them.

When the Plataeans realized that the Thebans were inside and that the city had been suddenly seized, they were terrified. Believing that far more men had come in than had (for they could not see in the dark), they came to terms, accepted the proposals and kept quiet, especially since the Thebans were taking no violent action against anyone. But in the course of these negotiations they somehow noticed that the Thebans were not many, and they thought that if they attacked they would easily overcome them. For the mass of the Plataeans did not want to break away from the Athenians.

So they decided the attempt had to be made. They gathered together by digging through the party walls between their houses, so that they would not be seen going along the streets. They set wagons without their draught animals in the streets to serve as a barricade, and they got everything else ready in whatever way seemed likely to be useful in the circumstances. When things were as ready as they could make them, they waited for the very end of the night, just before dawn, and then moved out from their houses against the Thebans. They did not want to attack them by daylight, when the Thebans would be bolder and fight on equal terms. At night the Thebans would be more frightened and at a disadvantage against the Plataeans’ own knowledge of the city. They attacked at once and quickly came to close quarters.

When the Thebans realized they had been tricked, they closed up into a tight body and pushed back the attacks wherever they fell on them. Two or three times they drove them off. But the Plataeans kept attacking with a great uproar, while the women and slaves on the houses screamed and shrieked and pelted them with stones and tiles, and heavy rain had set in during the night as well. Then the Thebans panicked, turned and fled through the city. Most of them did not know, in the dark and the mud, which way through the streets led to safety (for this happened at the end of the month). Their pursuers, by contrast, knew exactly how to stop them escaping, so most of them were killed.note

One of the Plataeans shut the gates by which they had come in, the only ones that were open. He used the butt-spike of a javelin in place of the pin in the bar, so that there was no longer a way out even there. Chased through the city, some of the Thebans climbed onto the wall and threw themselves over to the outside, and most of these were killed. Others got out by a deserted gate, where a woman gave them an axe and they cut through the bar unnoticed. But not many escaped this way, for they were soon discovered. The rest were killed, scattered in different parts of the city.

The largest group, the men who had kept most closely together, burst into a large building that formed part of the wall. Its doors happened to be open, and they thought the doors of the building were a gate and a passage straight through to the outside. When the Plataeans saw that they were trapped, they debated whether to burn them where they were by setting fire to the building, or to deal with them in some other way. In the end these men and all the other Thebans still left wandering about the city agreed to surrender themselves and their arms to the Plataeans, to be dealt with as they wished. That, then, was how things had gone for those in Plataea.

The rest of the Thebans were supposed to arrive in full force while it was still night, in case anything went wrong for those who had gone in. They were on their way to help when the news of what had happened reached them on the road. Plataea is seventy stades from Thebes, and the rain that had fallen in the night made them slower in coming, because the river Asopus was running high and was not easy to cross. Marching in the rain and crossing the river with difficulty, they arrived too late. By then some of the men had been killed and the rest were being held alive.note

When the Thebans learned what had happened, they began plotting against the Plataeans outside the city. There were people out in the fields, and property too, as you would expect when trouble has come unexpectedly in peacetime. They wanted anyone they caught to be in their hands as a counterweight for the men inside, in case any of these had in fact been taken alive. While they were planning this, the Plataeans suspected that something of the sort would happen. Fearing for those outside, they sent a herald to the Thebans while the Thebans were still deliberating. They declared that what the Thebans had done was impious, trying to seize their city while the treaty was in force, and they told them not to harm what was outside.

Otherwise, they said, they too would kill the Theban men they were holding alive; but if the Thebans withdrew from their territory, they would give the men back to them. That is the Theban account, and the Thebans say the Plataeans swore to it. The Plataeans do not agree that they promised to return the men at once. They say the men were to be returned only after talks had been held, and only if an agreement was reached, and they deny having sworn any oath. At any rate, the Thebans withdrew from the territory without doing any harm. But as soon as the Plataeans had hastily brought in their property from the countryside, they killed the men immediately. A hundred and eighty had been taken, and Eurymachus, with whom the traitors had made their arrangements, was one of them.

After doing this they sent a messenger to Athens, gave the dead back to the Thebans under a truce, and settled matters in the city as seemed best to them in the circumstances. The Athenians were told at once what had happened at Plataea. They immediately arrested all the Boeotians who were in Attica and sent a herald to Plataea. His orders were to tell the Plataeans to take no drastic step about the Theban men they held until the Athenians too had come to some decision about them. The Athenians had not been told that the men were dead.

The first messenger had left just as the Thebans were getting in, and the second just after they had been defeated and captured, so the Athenians knew nothing of what happened later. They therefore sent their instructions in ignorance, and when the herald arrived he found the men dead. After this the Athenians marched to Plataea, brought in grain and left a garrison there. They also took away the least useful of the population, along with the women and children.

Neither side thought small; both threw themselves vigorously into the war, and not unnaturally. Everyone takes hold of things more eagerly at the beginning. At that time there were also many young men in the Peloponnese and many in Athens who had never known war, and so were far from unwilling to take it up. All the rest of Greece was in suspense as its leading cities came into conflict. Many prophecies were being recited, and oracle-mongers chanted many oracles, both among those about to go to war and in the other cities. Besides this, Delos had been shaken by an earthquake shortly before, though it had never been shaken before within Greek memory. It was said, and believed, to be a sign of what was to come.note

And whenever anything else of the kind happened to occur, it was all eagerly searched out. People’s goodwill leaned strongly toward the Spartans, especially since they had proclaimed that they were liberating Greece. Every individual and every city was eager to help them in any way possible, in word and in deed. Each one felt that the cause would suffer wherever he could not take part himself. That was how angry most people were with the Athenians. Some wanted to be freed from their empire, and others were afraid of coming under it.

Such, then, were the preparations and the spirit with which they set out. These were the cities that each side had as allies when they entered the war. The allies of the Spartans were as follows. Within the Isthmus there were all the Peloponnesians except the Argives and the Achaeans. These two were on friendly terms with both sides, though the Pellenians alone of the Achaeans joined in the war at first, and later all of them did. Outside the Peloponnese there were the Megarians, Boeotians, Locrians, Phocians, Ambraciots, Leucadians and Anactorians. Of these, the Corinthians, Megarians, Sicyonians, Pellenians, Eleans, Ambraciots and Leucadians supplied ships, and the Boeotians, Phocians and Locrians supplied cavalry. The other cities supplied infantry.

That was the Spartan alliance. The Athenians’ allies were the Chians, the Lesbians, the Plataeans, the Messenians at Naupactus, most of the Acarnanians, the Corcyraeans and the Zacynthians. Besides these there were the other cities that paid tribute, among the following peoples: coastal Caria, the Dorians living next to the Carians, Ionia, the Hellespont, the region toward Thrace, the islands lying east between the Peloponnese and Crete, and all the Cyclades except Melos and Thera. Of these, the Chians, Lesbians and Corcyraeans supplied ships, and the rest supplied infantry and money. Such were the alliance and the war resources of each side.

Some of you may think that we are attacking in great numbers and that it is quite safe to assume the enemy will not come out and fight us. Even so, we must not advance any less carefully prepared on that account. Rather, the leader and soldier of each city must always expect, for his own part, to meet some danger. For the course of wars is uncertain, and attacks mostly come at short notice and in anger. Often a smaller force has been afraid and so defended itself better against a larger one, because the larger force held it in contempt and was caught unprepared.

In enemy territory one must always march confident in spirit but, in action, prepared as though afraid. In this way men will be most courageous in attacking the enemy and safest against being attacked. And the city we are going against is far from incapable of defending itself; it is superbly equipped in every respect. So we must fully expect them to come out and fight. If they are not already on the move before we have even arrived, they will be when they see us in their land, ravaging it and destroying their property.

Anger seizes everyone when they see themselves suffering something unaccustomed, before their very eyes and at that very moment. Those who use reason least are the ones most driven to act by passion. The Athenians are likely to do this even more than others. They claim the right to rule others, and they are used to invading and ravaging their neighbors’ land rather than seeing their own ravaged. You are marching against so great a city, and the outcome, whichever way it falls, will bring the greatest reputation to our ancestors and to ourselves. So follow wherever you are led, putting discipline and vigilance above everything and carrying out orders promptly. For the finest and safest thing is this: that a large body of men should be seen acting with a single discipline.”

They sent escorts with Melesippus to make sure that he spoke with no one. When he reached the border and was about to part from them, he said only this before going on his way: “This day will be the beginning of great troubles for the Greeks.” When he got back to the camp, Archidamus realized that the Athenians would still not give way at all. Only then did he break camp and advance with his army into their territory. The Boeotians supplied their share of troops and their cavalry to campaign with the Peloponnesians. With the rest of their forces they went to Plataea and ravaged its land.

He also gave them the same advice about the present situation as before. They were to prepare for the war and bring in their property from the countryside. They were not to go out to battle, but to come into the city and guard it. They were to fit out the fleet, in which their strength lay, and to keep a firm hand on the allies. He told them that their strength came from the money the allies paid in, and that most things in war are won by judgment and a surplus of money.

He told them to take heart. On average, six hundred talents of tribute came in to the city every year from the allies, not counting its other revenue. There were also still at that time six thousand talents of coined silver on the Acropolis. (The most there had ever been was ten thousand less three hundred, and from this money had been spent on the Propylaea of the Acropolis and the other buildings, and on Potidaea.) Besides this there was uncoined gold and silver in private and public dedications, all the sacred vessels used for the processions and the games, the spoils taken from the Persians, and anything else of that kind, all of which [was worth] no less than five hundred talents.note

He added the considerable sums held in the other temples, which they could use. If they were cut off from absolutely everything, they could use even the gold plating on the goddess herself. He pointed out that the statue carried forty talents’ weight of refined gold, and that all of it was removable. But if they used it to save themselves, he said, they must afterward put back no less than they took. That was how he encouraged them about money. As for hoplites, he said there were thirteen thousand, not counting the sixteen thousand in the forts and along the battlements. For that was how many stood guard at first whenever the enemy invaded, drawn from the oldest and the youngest citizens and from those metics who were hoplites.note

For the Phaleric wall ran thirty-five stades to the circuit of the city, and the guarded part of the circuit itself was forty-three stades. (Part of it was left unguarded: the stretch between the Long Wall and the Phaleric.) The Long Walls to the Piraeus were forty stades, of which the outer one was manned. The whole perimeter of the Piraeus, including Munychia, was sixty stades, half of it under guard. He reported twelve hundred cavalry, including mounted archers, sixteen hundred archers, and three hundred seaworthy triremes. These were the forces the Athenians had, and no less in each category, when the Peloponnesian invasion was first about to happen and they were entering the war. Pericles also made other arguments, as he usually did, to show that they would come through the war victorious.note

This had been the Athenians’ way, more than other people’s, from very early times. Under Cecrops and the first kings down to Theseus, Attica had always been inhabited in separate cities, each with its own town hall and magistrates. Unless they were afraid of something, they did not gather to take counsel with the king; each governed itself and made its own decisions. Some of them even went to war at times, as the Eleusinians under Eumolpus did against Erechtheus.note

But when Theseus became king, being powerful as well as intelligent, he reorganized the country in various ways. In particular, he abolished the council chambers and magistracies of the other cities and brought everyone together into what is now the city, establishing a single council chamber and town hall. Each group went on occupying its own land as before, but he compelled them all to use this one city. Since everyone now contributed to it, it became great, and Theseus handed it on in that state to those who came after. And from that time to this day the Athenians hold a public festival for the goddess, the Synoikia.note

Before that, what is now the Acropolis was the city, together with the area below it facing mainly south. The evidence is this: the temples on the Acropolis itself are those of other gods too, and those outside are situated mostly toward this part of the city—the temple of Olympian Zeus, the Pythium, the temple of Earth, and that of Dionysus in the Marshes, in whose honor the older Dionysia are held [on the twelfth day] in the month of Anthesterion, just as the Ionians descended from the Athenians still customarily hold them today.note

Other ancient temples are also situated there. Then there is the fountain now called Enneakrounos, “Nine Spouts,” because the tyrants arranged it so, but which in old times, when the springs were open, was named Callirrhoe, “Fair-flowing.” Since it was close by, the people of those days used it for the most important purposes, and even now, by ancient custom, its water is used before weddings and for other sacred rites. And because of that ancient settlement, the Acropolis is still to this day called “the city” by the Athenians.note

So for a long time the Athenians lived in independent settlements spread throughout the country. Even after they were unified, most of them, both in early times and afterward down to this war, kept the habit of being born and living in the countryside, and so they did not easily move with their whole households—especially as they had only recently restored their property after the Persian Wars. They were weighed down with distress at leaving their homes and the shrines that had always been their ancestral ones since the old form of government, at having to change their way of life, and at each of them abandoning nothing less than his own city.

When they reached the city, a few had houses of their own, and some found refuge with friends or relatives. Most of them, though, settled in the empty parts of the city and in all the temples and hero-shrines except the Acropolis, the Eleusinium, and any other that could be securely locked. Even the so-called Pelargikon below the Acropolis was occupied under the pressure of immediate necessity, although there was a curse against living there, and the tail end of a Pythian oracle also forbade it, saying, “Better the Pelargikon left idle.”note

It seems to me that the oracle came true in the opposite way from what people expected. The disasters did not come upon the city because of the unlawful occupation; rather, the need to occupy the place came because of the war, and the oracle, without naming the war, foresaw that the place would never be settled for any good reason. Many also set themselves up in the towers of the walls, and wherever each could find room, since the city could not hold them all once they had come together. Later, though, they divided up the Long Walls and lived along them, and in most of the Piraeus. At the same time they set about preparing for the war, gathering allies and fitting out an expedition of a hundred ships against the Peloponnese. That was the stage their preparations had reached.

Then, while the army was being assembled, the delay at the Isthmus and his slowness on the rest of the march had brought him into discredit, and most of all the halt at Oenoe. For it was during this time that the Athenians were bringing their property in, and the Peloponnesians thought that if they had advanced quickly they would have caught everything still outside, had it not been for his dawdling. Such was the anger the army felt toward Archidamus during the encampment. But he held back, so it is said, because he expected that the Athenians, while their land was still unharmed, would make some concession and would shrink from letting it be ravaged.

However, when they had attacked Oenoe and tried every method without being able to take it, and the Athenians sent no herald, they finally set out from there. About the eightieth day after what happened at Plataea [to the Thebans who entered it], in midsummer when the grain was ripe, they invaded Attica. They were led by Archidamus son of Zeuxidamus, king of the Spartans. They encamped and ravaged first Eleusis and the Thriasian plain, and routed some Athenian cavalry near the place called the Rheiti. Then they advanced through Cropia, keeping Mount Aegaleos on their right, until they reached Acharnae, the largest place in Attica among the so-called demes. They halted there, made camp, and stayed a long time ravaging.note

It is said that Archidamus’ reason for staying around Acharnae in battle order, and not coming down into the plain during that invasion, was this. He hoped that the Athenians, in the prime of a large population of young men and prepared for war as never before, might come out against him and would not let their land be ravaged. So when they did not meet him at Eleusis and the Thriasian plain, he camped around Acharnae to test whether they would come out.

For one thing, the place seemed to him suitable for a camp. For another, he thought the Acharnians, who were a large part of the city (they numbered three thousand hoplites), would not stand by and see their property destroyed, but would rouse everyone to battle. And if the Athenians did not come out against him during that invasion, he could in future ravage the plain with less fear and even advance on the city itself. For the Acharnians, once deprived of their own property, would not be as eager to run risks for the land of others, and there would be division in the Athenians’ resolve. Such was Archidamus’ thinking at Acharnae.

They gathered in knots and argued fiercely, some urging a sortie, others opposing it. Oracle-mongers chanted oracles of every kind, and each man listened to them according to his own inclination. The Acharnians, who considered themselves no small part of the Athenian people, pressed hardest for the sortie, since it was their land being ravaged. The city was stirred up in every way. They were angry with Pericles and remembered nothing of the advice he had given earlier; they abused him because, though he was general, he would not lead them out, and they held him responsible for everything they were suffering.

Pericles saw that they were angry at the present situation and not thinking at their best, but he was confident that he was right not to go out. So he did not call an assembly or any meeting at all, so that they would not come together and make some mistake through anger rather than judgment. He kept guard over the city and kept it as quiet as he could. He did, however, keep sending out cavalry to stop advance parties from the army from raiding the fields near the city and doing damage.

There was a brief cavalry engagement at a place called Phrygia between one squadron of the Athenian cavalry, with the Thessalians alongside them, and the Boeotian cavalry. In it the Athenians and Thessalians held their own until the Boeotian hoplites came up in support; then they were routed, and a few of the Thessalians and Athenians were killed. They recovered the bodies, though, the same day, without a truce. The Peloponnesians set up a trophy the next day. This help from the Thessalians came to the Athenians under their old alliance. Those who came were Larisaeans, Pharsalians, [Parasians,] Crannonians, Pyrasians, Gyrtonians and Pheraeans. Their leaders were Polymedes and Aristonous from Larisa, one from each faction, and Menon from Pharsalus; the others too had their own commanders city by city.note

The Athenians set out and sailed along the coast. Putting in at Pheia in Elis, they ravaged the land for two days and defeated in battle a picked force of three hundred from Hollow Elis and some Eleans from the dependent territory nearby who came to help. Then a strong wind came down, and since they were caught by the storm in a place without a harbor, most of them boarded the ships and sailed round the headland called Ichthys to the harbor at Pheia. Meanwhile the Messenians and some others who could not get aboard went overland and took Pheia. Later the ships sailed round and picked them up, and they put out to sea, abandoning Pheia, and by now the main Elean army had come up in support. The Athenians sailed on along the coast to other places and ravaged them.note

This Teres has no connection at all with the Tereus who took Procne, the daughter of Pandion, from Athens as his wife. They did not even come from the same Thrace. [Tereus] lived in Daulia, in the land now called Phocis, which was then inhabited by Thracians, and it was in this land that the women committed the deed concerning Itys. (Many of the poets, too, when they mention the nightingale, call the bird “the Daulian.”) It is also likely that Pandion formed the marriage alliance for his daughter across so short a distance, for the sake of mutual help, rather than across a journey of many days to the Odrysians. Teres, who did not even have the same name, was the first to become king [and] hold power among the Odrysians.note

It was his son Sitalces whom the Athenians were now making their ally, because they wanted him to help them subdue the places in the Thracian region, and Perdiccas. Nymphodorus came to Athens, concluded the alliance with Sitalces and had Sitalces’ son Sadocus made an Athenian, and he undertook to bring the war in Thrace to an end, for he would persuade Sitalces to send the Athenians a Thracian force of cavalry and peltasts. He also reconciled Perdiccas with the Athenians and persuaded them to give Therme back to him. And Perdiccas at once joined the Athenians and Phormio on a campaign against the Chalcidians. In this way Sitalces son of Teres, king of the Thracians, became an ally of the Athenians, and so did Perdiccas son of Alexander, king of the Macedonians.note

This was indeed the largest Athenian army ever assembled in one body, since the city was still at its height and had not yet been struck by the plague. The Athenians themselves numbered no fewer than ten thousand hoplites (not counting the three thousand at Potidaea), and the metics who joined the invasion numbered no fewer than three thousand hoplites. Besides these there was a sizable crowd of light troops. After ravaging most of the land they withdrew. Later in the war the Athenians made other invasions of the Megarid every year, sometimes with cavalry and sometimes in full force, until Nisaea was captured by the Athenians.note

In the following winter Evarchus the Acarnanian, who wanted to return to Astacus, persuaded the Corinthians to sail with forty ships and fifteen hundred hoplites and restore him, and he himself hired some mercenaries as well. The commanders of the expedition were Euphamidas son of Aristonymus, Timoxenus son of Timocrates and Eumachus son of Chrysis. They sailed and restored him. They also wanted to win over some places in the rest of coastal Acarnania, and made the attempt, but when they could not, they sailed off home. On the voyage along the coast they put in at Cephallenia and made a landing in the territory of the Cranians. There they were deceived by the Cranians under some agreement, and when the Cranians fell on them unexpectedly they lost some of their men. They put out to sea under heavy pressure and made their way home.

They then place the bones in the public tomb, which lies in the most beautiful suburb of the city. There they always bury those who have fallen in war, except for those who fell at Marathon: they judged the excellence of these men to be outstanding, and so made their tomb on the spot. When they have covered the remains with earth, a man chosen by the city, someone thought to be of sound judgment and preeminent in public esteem, delivers a fitting eulogy over them. After this they depart. That is how they bury their dead, and throughout the whole war, whenever the occasion arose, they followed this custom. Over these first dead, then, Pericles son of Xanthippus was chosen to speak. When the moment came, he went forward from the tomb onto a high platform that had been built so that he could be heard by as much of the crowd as possible, and spoke as follows:note

The hearer who knows the facts and is well disposed may well think that what is said falls somewhat short of what he wishes and knows. The one without experience, if he hears of anything beyond his own nature, may think some things exaggerated, out of envy. For praise spoken of others is tolerable only up to the point where each man believes that he too could do some of what he has heard. Whatever goes beyond that, men envy, and so they disbelieve it. But since the men of old approved this practice as right, I too must follow the custom and try to meet, as far as I can, the wishes and expectations of each of you.

The deeds of war by which each of these possessions was won, or the times when we ourselves or our fathers eagerly beat off an enemy, non-Greek or Greek, who came against us, I shall pass over, since I do not wish to speak at length among those who already know them. Instead I shall first show the way of life by which we came to them, and the form of government and the habits out of which our greatness grew, and then I shall go on to the praise of these men. I think these things are not unfitting to speak of on the present occasion, and that it is to the advantage of this whole gathering, citizens and foreigners alike, to hear them.

We conduct our public affairs freely, and we are just as free from suspicion of one another in our daily pursuits. We are not angry with our neighbor if he does something for his own pleasure, nor do we put on the sour looks that do no actual harm but are still painful to see. While we associate with one another in private without offense, in public affairs it is above all through fear that we do not break the law. We obey whoever holds office at the time, and the laws, especially those laid down for the protection of the wronged and those which, though unwritten, bring acknowledged shame on anyone who breaks them.

No enemy has ever yet met our full strength in one body, because we attend to our navy at the same time as we send our own men out on land to many places. But if they engage some part of our forces somewhere, they boast that they have beaten all of us when they defeat a few, and that they were beaten by all of us when they lose. And yet if we are willing to face danger in a relaxed spirit rather than through laborious training, and with a courage that springs less from laws than from our way of life, we gain this advantage: we do not suffer in advance over hardships still to come, and when we meet them we show ourselves no less daring than those who are forever toiling. In these respects the city deserves to be admired, and in others too.

For in this too we are distinctive: the same men are both most daring and most given to reasoning out what we are about to undertake, whereas in others ignorance brings boldness and reasoning brings hesitation. Those would rightly be judged the strongest of soul who know most clearly both what is terrible and what is pleasant, and are not deterred by this from facing danger. In matters of excellence, too, we are the opposite of most people: we make our friends not by receiving kindness but by doing it. The one who has done the favor is the firmer friend, since through his goodwill he keeps alive the debt owed by the one to whom he gave it. The one who owes in return is less keen, knowing that he will repay his good deed not as a favor but as a debt. And we alone help others fearlessly, not from a calculation of self-interest so much as from confidence in our freedom.

We have displayed our power with great proofs, and certainly not without witnesses, and we shall be admired by men now and in times to come. We need no Homer to praise us, nor any poet whose verses will give pleasure for the moment while the truth will undo the impression they give of the deeds. We have forced every sea and every land to open up to our daring, and everywhere we have established, along with our settlements, everlasting memorials of harm and of good. It was for such a city, then, that these men nobly fought and died, holding it right that she should not be taken from them, and it is fitting that every one of those left behind should be willing to suffer for her.

None of these men grew soft because he preferred the continued enjoyment of wealth, nor did any put off the danger in the hope that poverty holds out, that he might yet escape it and grow rich. They desired revenge on their enemies more than these things, and, believing this the finest of dangers, they chose to face it, so as to punish the enemy and, with that, to aim at those other things. They entrusted to hope the uncertainty of success, but in deed, regarding what was already before their eyes, they saw fit to rely on themselves. And thinking it better to suffer in the very act of defending themselves than to find [the] safety that comes of giving way, they fled from dishonor in word, but in deed stood their ground with their bodies. And in the briefest moment of fortune, at the height of their glory rather than of their fear, they passed away.

Make these men your models now. Judge that happiness is freedom and freedom is courage, and do not shrink from the dangers of war. For it is not the unfortunate, who have no hope of anything good, who have more reason to be unsparing of their lives. It is those who, while they still live, risk a reversal for the worse, and for whom the difference is greatest if they stumble. For to a man of any pride, the degradation that comes with cowardice is more painful than a death that comes unfelt, in the midst of his strength and the hope he shares with all.

Those of you still of an age to have children must bear up in the hope of others. In private life, the children who are born will help some of you forget those who are gone. And the city will gain in two ways: it will not be left empty, and it will be more secure. For men cannot give fair and just counsel unless they too have children to stake and risk on equal terms with the rest. As for those of you who are past your prime, count as gain the greater part of your life, in which you were fortunate, and remember that what remains will be short. Take comfort in the glory of these men. For the love of honor alone does not grow old. In the useless years of life it is not making money, as some say, that gives the greater pleasure, but being honored.

For those of you here who are sons or brothers of these men, I see a great struggle ahead, since everyone is accustomed to praise the one who is no more. Even if your excellence surpasses theirs, you would hardly be judged their equals, only a little inferior. For the living are envied by their rivals, while what no longer stands in anyone’s way is honored with a goodwill that has no rival. And if I must also say something about the excellence of women, to those of you who will now be widows, I will put it all in a brief piece of advice. Great is your glory if you do not fall short of the nature that is yours, and great is hers who is least spoken of among men, whether in praise or in blame.

They had not yet been many days in Attica when the disease first broke out among the Athenians. It was said to have struck in many places before, around Lemnos and elsewhere, but nowhere was there any memory of so great a plague or such a destruction of human life. At first the doctors were no help, since they were treating it in ignorance. Indeed they died in the greatest numbers, because they came most into contact with the sick. No other human skill was any help either. Whatever supplications people made at temples, and whatever use they made of oracles and the like, all of it was useless. In the end they gave these things up, overcome by the evil.

It began first, so it is said, in Ethiopia beyond Egypt. Then it came down into Egypt and Libya and into most of the King’s territory. On the city of Athens it fell suddenly. It attacked people first in the Piraeus, so that they even said the Peloponnesians had thrown poison into the wells, for there were as yet no fountains there. Later it reached the upper city as well, and from then on far more people died.

Most were attacked by empty retching, which brought on violent spasms. In some these abated soon afterward, in others only much later. Outwardly the body was not very hot to the touch, nor pale. It was reddish and livid, and broke out in small blisters and sores. Inside, though, it burned so fiercely that they could not bear even the lightest clothing or linen sheets on them, or anything but going naked, and they would most gladly have thrown themselves into cold water. Many of those left untended actually did so and plunged into wells, gripped by an unquenchable thirst. It made no difference whether they drank much or little.

They were tormented without respite by a restlessness that would not let them keep still, and by sleeplessness. For as long as the disease was at its height, the body did not waste away but held out against the suffering beyond all expectation. So most of them either died on the ninth or seventh day from the burning within, while they still had some strength left, or else, if they got through that, the disease went down into the bowels. There severe ulceration set in, together with uncontrollable diarrhea, and most of them later died from the weakness this caused.

For the evil first settled in the head and then passed through the whole body, from the top downward. If anyone survived the worst of it, it still left its mark by seizing the extremities. It struck the genitals and the tips of the hands and feet, and many survived with the loss of these, some with the loss of their eyes as well. Others again, as soon as they rose from their sickbed, were seized by a loss of memory about everything alike, and did not know themselves or their friends.

The nature of the disease was beyond description. In other respects it fell upon each person more harshly than human nature can bear, and in one respect above all it showed itself to be something different from the familiar ailments. Many bodies lay unburied, yet the birds and four-footed animals that feed on human flesh either did not come near them or died if they tasted them. The proof is this: birds of that kind clearly disappeared, and they were not to be seen either elsewhere or around anything of the sort. The dogs made the outcome easier to observe, because they live with people.

The most terrible thing in the whole calamity was the despair that came when someone realized he was sick. They turned at once in their minds to hopelessness, gave themselves up far more readily and did not resist. Just as terrible was that they caught the infection from nursing one another and died like sheep. This caused the greatest loss of life. If, out of fear, they were unwilling to go near one another, they died alone, and many houses were emptied for lack of anyone to care for the sick. If they did go near, they perished, especially those who laid some claim to excellence. A sense of honor made them unsparing of themselves when they visited their friends, since in the end even the members of the household grew too exhausted to lament for the dying, overcome by the sheer scale of the evil.

Yet those who had come through it showed the most pity for the dying and the suffering. They knew it from experience, and they themselves now felt safe, for it did not attack the same person twice, at least not fatally. They were congratulated by everyone else. In the elation of the moment they also held a light-headed hope that for the rest of their lives no other disease would ever kill them either.

The sanctuaries in which they had camped were full of corpses, for people died right there. As the evil overwhelmed them, people did not know what would become of them and came to disregard what was sacred and what was profane alike. All the customs they had previously observed for burials were thrown into confusion, and each buried his dead as best he could. Many resorted to shameless ways of disposing of the dead, because they lacked what they needed, since so many in their families had already died. Some would reach a pyre built by others before the builders did, lay their own dead on it and set it alight. Others, while another body was burning, threw the one they were carrying on top of it and went away.

No one was eager to toil any further for what was thought fine, since he considered it uncertain whether he would die before he reached it. Whatever was pleasant here and now, and whatever served that pleasure from any quarter, became both fine and useful. No fear of gods or law of men held them back. As for the gods, they judged it the same whether one worshipped them or not, since they saw everyone perishing alike. As for their offenses, no one expected to live until the case came to trial and to pay the penalty. They believed that a far heavier sentence had already been passed on them and was hanging over their heads, and before it fell it was reasonable to get some enjoyment out of life.

Those who knew of it also recalled the oracle given to the Spartans. When they asked the god whether they should go to war, he answered that if they fought with all their might victory would be theirs, and he said that he himself would take their part. As for the oracle, people supposed that what was happening matched it. The disease had begun immediately after the Peloponnesians invaded, and it did not enter the Peloponnese to any extent worth mentioning. It ravaged Athens most of all, and after Athens the most populous of the other places. These were the events of the plague.note

While the enemy were still in the plain, before they reached the coastal region, he was preparing an expedition of a hundred ships against the Peloponnese, and when it was ready he put to sea. On board the ships he took four thousand Athenian hoplites and three hundred cavalry in horse transports, which were then made for the first time out of old ships. The Chians and Lesbians also joined the expedition with fifty ships. When this Athenian force put to sea, it left the Peloponnesians in the coastal part of Attica.

They arrived at Epidaurus in the Peloponnese and ravaged most of the land. They attacked the city and came to hope they might take it, but they did not succeed. Putting out from Epidaurus, they ravaged the territories of Troezen, Halieis and Hermione, all of which lie on the coast of the Peloponnese. Setting sail from there, they came to Prasiae, a small coastal town in Laconia. They ravaged some of its land, and took the town itself and sacked it. After this they returned home. They no longer found the Peloponnesians in Attica, since these had withdrawn.

Since, then, a city can bear the misfortunes of individuals, while no single individual can bear those of the city, surely all of you must come to its defense, and not do what you are doing now. Stunned by your troubles at home, you are letting go of the common safety, and you are blaming both me, who advised you to go to war, and yourselves, who decided on it with me. And yet the man you are angry with is someone who, I believe, is inferior to no one in knowing what needs to be done and in explaining it, a man who loves his city and is above money.

A man who knows what is needed but does not explain it clearly is no better off than if he had never thought of it. One who has both abilities but is ill-disposed to the city would not speak with the same loyalty to its interests. And if he has this as well but can be overcome by money, he would sell everything for that one thing alone. So if you were persuaded to go to war because you thought that these qualities belonged to me even moderately more than to others, it would not be reasonable for me to bear the blame for wrongdoing now.

What is sudden and unexpected, what happens most against all calculation, enslaves the spirit, and this has happened to you, on top of everything else, above all with the plague. Nevertheless, as inhabitants of a great city, raised in a character to match it, you must be willing to stand up even to the greatest misfortunes and not let your reputation be extinguished. People think it equally right to blame anyone who through weakness falls short of the glory he already has, and to hate anyone who through presumption reaches for a glory that does not belong to him. You must put aside your private griefs and hold fast to the common safety.

So this power is plainly not to be measured against the use of your houses and land, which you think it a great loss to be deprived of. Nor is it reasonable to take their loss hard, rather than to think little of them, regarding them, compared with this power, as a garden plot or an ornament of wealth. You should recognize that freedom, if we hold on to it and preserve it, will easily recover these things, whereas those who submit to others tend to lose even what they had before. You should show yourselves no worse in either respect than your fathers. They won these things by their own labors and did not receive them from others, and they not only held them but preserved them and handed them on to you (and it is more shameful to be robbed of what you have than to fail in acquiring it). And you should go to meet the enemy not only with pride but with contempt.

Boastful pride can arise even from lucky ignorance, and even in a coward. Contempt belongs to the man who is confident, on the basis of judgment, that he is superior to his enemies, and that is our position. When fortune is equal, intelligence, drawing on this sense of superiority, makes daring more secure. It relies less on hope, whose strength lies in desperate situations, and more on judgment based on the facts as they are, whose foresight is more dependable.

It is right, too, that you should come to the support of the honor the city derives from its rule, in which you all take pride, and not shun the labors unless you also give up pursuing the honors. Do not think that you are fighting over one thing only, slavery instead of freedom. It is also about the loss of empire, and the danger from the hatred you have incurred in ruling it. Nor is it possible for you any longer to give it up, even if someone, out of fear in the present crisis, is playing the honest man by keeping out of affairs. For by now you hold it like a tyranny: to have taken it may seem unjust, but to let it go is dangerous. Men like these would very quickly ruin a city if they persuaded others, or if they set up somewhere on their own as an independent state. For the quiet life is not safe unless it is ranged alongside the active, and it does not suit a ruling city, but only a subject one, to be safely enslaved.

Know that our city has the greatest name among all mankind because it does not give in to misfortunes, because it has spent more lives and labors in war than any other, and because it has possessed the greatest power up to this time. The memory of that power will be left to those who come after us forever, even if now we should at some point give way a little (for all things are by nature subject to decline): that we, Greeks, ruled over more Greeks than any other Greeks; that we held out in the greatest wars against them, both all together and one by one; and that we lived in a city richer in every resource and greater than any. Granted, the man who wants a quiet life may find fault with this, but the man who wants to accomplish something himself will emulate it, and anyone who does not have it will envy it.

To be hated and resented for the present has been the lot of all who have claimed to rule over others. But whoever incurs envy for the greatest ends judges rightly. Hatred does not last long, while the brilliance of the moment and the glory hereafter are left behind in everlasting memory. You, then, must foresee what will be fine in the future and what will not be shameful in the present, and win both by your zeal now. Do not send heralds to the Spartans, and do not let it be seen that you are weighed down by your present hardships. For those who in the face of misfortune are least troubled in spirit and most resistant in deed are the strongest, whether they are cities or individuals.”

Still, they did not all let go of their anger against him until they had fined him. But not long afterward, as a crowd tends to do, they elected him general again and entrusted everything to him. By now each of them felt the pain of his own private losses less keenly, and they considered him the most valuable man for what the whole city needed. For all the time he stood at the head of the city in peacetime, he led it with moderation and kept it safe, and it was under him that it reached its greatest height. And when the war broke out, he evidently judged its strength correctly in this too.

He lived on for two years and six months, and after his death his foresight about the war was recognized still more. He had said that they would prevail if they kept quiet, looked after the navy, did not try to add to the empire during the war, and did not put the city at risk. They did the opposite in all of this. And in other matters that seemed unrelated to the war, driven by private ambition and private gain, they pursued policies that were bad both for themselves and for their allies. When these succeeded, the honor and advantage went rather to individuals; when they failed, the damage fell on the city in its conduct of the war.note

The reason was that he, powerful through his standing and his judgment, and conspicuously incorruptible, held the people in check while respecting their freedom. He was not led by them; rather, he led them. Because he had not acquired his power by improper means, he did not speak to please them; holding it by virtue of his standing, he could even oppose them to the point of making them angry. At any rate, whenever he saw them arrogantly confident at the wrong moment, his words would strike them with fear; and when they were unreasonably afraid, he would restore them to confidence again. So what was in word a democracy was in deed rule by the first man.

Those who came after were more on a level with one another, and as each strove to be first, they took to handing over even the conduct of affairs to the people’s whims. From this came many mistakes, as one would expect in a great city that held an empire, among them the expedition to Sicily. This was not so much an error of judgment about the people they were attacking. Rather, those who sent it out failed to decide on what would support the men who had gone, and instead, busy with private slanders over the leadership of the people, they blunted the army’s operations and for the first time fell into turmoil among themselves over the affairs of the city.note

Yet even after their defeat in Sicily, where they lost the rest of their forces and the greater part of their fleet, and with the city by then in civil strife, they held out for three years against their original enemies, who were now joined by those from Sicily, and against most of their allies, who had revolted, and later against Cyrus, the King’s son, who joined the enemy and supplied the Peloponnesians with money for their fleet. And they did not give in until they had fallen foul of one another in their private quarrels and brought themselves down. So ample were the grounds Pericles had at that time for his own forecast that the city could very easily prevail in the war over the Peloponnesians alone.note

But Athenian envoys who happened to be with Sitalces, Learchus son of Callimachus and Ameiniades son of Philemon, persuaded Sadocus, the son of Sitalces, who had been made an Athenian citizen, to hand the men over to them, so that they would not cross over to the King and do what harm they could to his adopted city. He was persuaded. As they were traveling through Thrace to the boat in which they were to cross the Hellespont, he arrested them before they could embark, sending others along with Learchus and Ameiniades, and ordered that the men be handed over to the two envoys. They took them and brought them to Athens.

When they arrived, the Athenians were afraid that Aristeus might escape and do them still more harm, since even before this he had evidently been behind everything at Potidaea and in the Thracian region. So that same day they put them all to death without trial, though they wished to say something, and threw them into a ravine. They considered it right to retaliate by the same means the Spartans had used first, when they had killed the traders of the Athenians and their allies whom they had caught sailing round the Peloponnese in merchant ships, and had thrown them into ravines. For at the beginning of the war the Spartans killed as enemies all those they caught at sea, both those fighting on the Athenian side and those who were on neither side.note

When this happened, the Amphilochians put themselves under the protection of the Acarnanians, and the two together called in the Athenians, who sent them Phormio as general with thirty ships. [And] when Phormio arrived they took Argos by storm and enslaved the Ambraciots, and the Amphilochians and Acarnanians settled it jointly. After this the alliance between the Athenians and the Acarnanians was first made. The Ambraciots first conceived their enmity toward the Argives from this enslavement of their own people. Later, in the war, they made this expedition, with their own forces and those of the Chaonians and some other neighboring non-Greeks. They came to Argos and controlled the countryside, but when they could not take the city by assault, they went back home and dispersed, each people to its own land. These were the events of the summer.note

These were the terms they agreed on: the Potidaeans were to leave with their children, their wives and their mercenaries. The men could take one cloak each and the women two, and they could take a fixed sum of money for the journey. So they left under the truce for Chalcidice, or wherever each of them could go. The Athenians, however, blamed the generals for making the agreement without consulting them, since they thought they could have taken the city on whatever terms they wished. Later they sent settlers of their own to Potidaea and colonized it. These things happened in the winter, and so ended [the] second year of this war that Thucydides recorded.

In the following summer the Peloponnesians and their allies did not invade Attica but marched against Plataea. Their leader was Archidamus son of Zeuxidamus, king of the Spartans. He encamped his army and was about to ravage the land, but the Plataeans at once sent envoys to him, who spoke as follows: “Archidamus and Spartans, you are not acting justly in marching against the land of the Plataeans, nor in a way worthy of yourselves or of the fathers you come from.

Pausanias son of Cleombrotus, the Spartan, freed Greece from the Persians together with those Greeks who chose to share the danger of the battle fought on our land. Afterward he offered sacrifice in the marketplace of Plataea to Zeus the Liberator. Then he called together all the allies and gave back to the Plataeans their land and their city, to hold and to live in as an independent people. No one was ever to march against them unjustly or to enslave them. If anyone did, the allies then present were to defend them with all their strength.note

This is what your fathers granted us, in return for the excellence and zeal we showed in those dangers. But you are doing the opposite, because you have come with the Thebans, our bitterest enemies, to enslave us. We call to witness the gods by whom the oaths were sworn then, the gods of your fathers and the gods of our own land. We tell you not to wrong the land of Plataea and not to break the oaths, but to let us live as an independent people, as Pausanias rightly decreed.”

That will satisfy us.” Archidamus said this much. When the Plataean envoys had heard it, they went into the city and reported what had been said to the people. Then they answered him that they could not do what he proposed without the Athenians, since their children and wives were in Athens. They also feared for the city as a whole. Once the Spartans had withdrawn, the Athenians might come and refuse to allow it. Or the Thebans, claiming to be covered by the oath under the clause about receiving both sides, might try again to seize their city.

To reassure them on these points he said: “Then hand over your city and your houses to us Spartans. Show us the boundaries of your land, the number of your trees, and anything else that can be counted. Move yourselves wherever you like for as long as the war lasts. When it is over, we will give back to you whatever we have received. Until then we will hold it in trust, working the land and paying you whatever rent will be enough for you.”

When they had heard this they went back into the city. After consulting with the people they replied that they wished first to put his proposals to the Athenians, and that if they could win the Athenians over, they would do what he asked. In the meantime they asked him to grant them a truce and not to ravage the land. He granted a truce for as many days as the journey there and back was likely to take, and he did not lay waste the land. The Plataean envoys went to the Athenians, consulted with them, and came back with this message for those in the city: “Men of Plataea, the Athenians say that never in the past, since we became their allies, have they abandoned you to anyone who wronged you, nor will they stand by and allow it now; they will help you with all their strength. And they charge you, by the oaths your fathers swore, to make no change in the alliance.”

When the envoys had brought back this report, the Plataeans resolved not to betray the Athenians but to endure, if they had to, the sight of their land being ravaged and whatever else they might suffer. No one was to go out any more, and they would answer from the wall that they could not do what the Spartans proposed. When they had given this answer, King Archidamus began by calling the gods and heroes of the country to witness, speaking as follows: “All you gods and heroes who hold the land of Plataea, be our witnesses. We did not come against this land wrongfully in the first place, but only after these people had first broken the oath we all swore together. This is the land where our fathers prayed to you and then defeated the Persians, and which you made favorable for the Greeks to fight in. Whatever we may do now, we will be doing no wrong, for we have made many reasonable proposals and have had none of them accepted. Grant, then, that those who began the wrong may be punished for it, and that those who seek lawful vengeance may obtain it.”

When the Plataeans saw the mound rising, they put together a wooden framework and set it on top of their own wall at the point where the mound was being piled against it. They filled it in with bricks, which they took by pulling down the houses nearby. The timbers held the structure together, so that it would not become weak as it grew higher. It had a screen of hides and skins in front, so that the workers and the timbers would not be hit by fire-arrows and could work in safety. The wall rose to a great height, and the mound rose against it just as fast. Then the Plataeans came up with this plan: they broke an opening in their wall where the mound met it and carried the earth into the city.

When the Peloponnesians noticed this, they packed clay into reed baskets and threw them into the gap, so that it would not crumble and be carried away like the earth. Blocked in this direction, the Plataeans gave up that method. Instead they dug a tunnel from the city and worked out where the mound lay above them. Once again they drew the loose earth away into the city, this time from underneath. For a long time the besiegers outside did not notice, and so for all the earth they threw on they made less progress, because the mound was being drawn away from beneath them and kept settling into the space being emptied.

But they were afraid that even so they might not be able to hold out, few as they were against many, so they devised something further. They stopped work on the great structure opposite the mound. Instead, starting from the low wall on either side of it, they built a crescent-shaped wall on the inside, curving back into the city. If the great wall were taken, this one would hold, and the enemy would have to pile up another mound against it. As they advanced inside they would have double the labor and be more exposed to attack from both sides.

Along with the mound, the Peloponnesians also brought siege engines up to the city. One was brought up on the mound against the great structure; it shook down a large part of it and frightened the Plataeans. Others were brought against other parts of the wall. Some of these the Plataeans caught in nooses and wrenched upward. They also hung great beams on long iron chains, attached at either end to two poles that leaned out and projected over the wall. They hauled the beams up crosswise. Whenever the engine was about to strike at any point, they let the beam go with the chains slack instead of holding it in their hands. It fell with a rush and snapped off the head of the ram.

The blaze was greater than any fire made by human hands that anyone had yet seen, up to that time at least; for in the mountains, before now, forest timber rubbed together by the winds has caught fire of its own accord and burst into flame. This fire was a great one, and the Plataeans, who had escaped everything else, came very close to being destroyed by it. There was a large area within the city that no one could approach, and if a wind had sprung up blowing toward the city, as the enemy were hoping, they would not have escaped. As it was, this too is said to have happened: heavy rain [from the sky] and thunder came on and put out the flames, and so the danger passed.

The Chalcidian hoplites, and some mercenaries with them, were defeated by the Athenians and fell back into Spartolus. But the Chalcidian cavalry and light troops defeated the Athenian cavalry and light troops. The Chalcidians had a few peltasts from the land called Crusis. Just after the battle more peltasts came from Olynthus to help. When the light troops from Spartolus saw them, they took heart from the reinforcements and from the fact that they had not been beaten before. Together with the Chalcidian cavalry and the newly arrived reinforcements they attacked the Athenians again, and the Athenians fell back to the two companies they had left with the baggage.

Whenever the Athenians advanced, the enemy gave way. When the Athenians withdrew, they pressed close and hurled javelins at them. The Chalcidian cavalry rode up and charged wherever they saw fit. Above all by spreading panic they routed the Athenians and pursued them a long way. The Athenians took refuge in Potidaea. Later they recovered their dead under a truce and returned to Athens with what was left of the army. Four hundred and thirty of them had been killed, and all the generals. The Chalcidians and Bottiaeans set up a trophy, took up their own dead, and dispersed to their cities.

The Corinthians were especially eager to support the Ambraciots, who were their colonists. The fleet from Corinth, Sicyon and the places in that area was still being got ready. The ships from Leucas, Anactorium and Ambracia had arrived first and were waiting at Leucas. Phormio commanded the twenty Athenian ships keeping guard off Naupactus, but Cnemus and his thousand hoplites crossed over without his noticing. As soon as they had crossed, they began preparing for the campaign by land. Of Greeks, Cnemus had with him the Ambraciots, the Leucadians and the Anactorians, and the thousand Peloponnesians he had brought himself. Of non-Greeks he had a thousand Chaonians, who have no king. They were led by Photius and Nicanor, from the ruling family, who held the leadership for a year at a time.

Thesprotians, who also have no king, marched along with the Chaonians. The Molossians and Atintanians were led by Sabylinthus, who was guardian of their king, Tharyps, since Tharyps was still a boy. The Parauaeans were led by their king, Oroedus. A thousand Orestians, whose king was Antiochus, marched with the Parauaeans, because Antiochus had entrusted them to Oroedus. Perdiccas also sent a thousand Macedonians without the Athenians’ knowledge, but they came later. With this army Cnemus set out, without waiting for the fleet from Corinth. Marching through the territory of Argos, they sacked Limnaea, an unwalled village. Then they came to Stratus, the largest city in Acarnania. They thought that if they took it first, the rest would readily come over to them.note

The Acarnanians learned that a large army had invaded by land and that the enemy would also be on them from the sea with ships. So they did not join forces to resist. Each community guarded its own territory, and they sent to Phormio urging him to help. He replied that he could not leave Naupactus unguarded when a fleet was about to sail out from Corinth. The Peloponnesians and their allies formed three divisions and advanced on the city of the Stratians. They meant to camp close by and, if they could not persuade the Stratians by words, to attack the wall in deed. The Chaonians and the other non-Greek troops advanced in the center. On their right were the Leucadians, the Anactorians and those with them, and on the left Cnemus with the Peloponnesians and the Ambraciots. The three divisions were far apart from one another, and at times they could not even see each other.

The Greeks advanced in order and kept on their guard until they had camped in a suitable spot. But the Chaonians were confident in themselves, and the mainland peoples of that region regarded them as the best fighters there. So they did not stop to occupy a camp. Instead they rushed ahead with the other non-Greeks, thinking they would take the city at the first assault and claim the achievement for themselves. The Stratians noticed them while they were still approaching. They reckoned that if they could defeat them while they were cut off from the rest, the Greeks would be less ready to come on against them. So they set ambushes around the city, and when the enemy were close, they charged at them all at once, both from the city and from the ambushes.

Once they were thrown into panic, many of the Chaonians were killed. When the other non-Greeks saw them give way, they no longer stood their ground but took to flight. Neither of the Greek divisions noticed the battle, because the Chaonians had gone far ahead of them and were thought to be hurrying on to seize a campsite. But when the fleeing non-Greeks came crashing in on them, they took them in, brought their camps together, and stayed quietly where they were for the rest of the day. The Stratians did not come to close quarters with them, since the rest of the Acarnanians had not yet arrived to support them. Instead they slung stones at them from a distance and reduced them to helplessness, for it was impossible to move without armor. The Acarnanians are considered the best at this kind of fighting.

When night fell, Cnemus hurried his army back to the river Anapus, which is eighty stades from Stratus. On the next day he recovered his dead under a truce. The people of Oeniadae had joined him out of friendship, and he withdrew into their territory before the Acarnanian relief force could arrive. From there each contingent went home. The Stratians set up a trophy for the battle against the non-Greeks.

The Corinthians and their allies were not sailing as if for a sea battle. They were equipped more as a military expedition to Acarnania, and did not think the Athenians would dare to fight a battle with their own twenty ships against the Corinthians’ forty-seven. But they saw the Athenians shadowing them along the opposite shore as they themselves coasted along theirs. Then, as they crossed from Patrae in Achaea to the mainland opposite on their way to Acarnania, they sighted the Athenians sailing toward them from Chalcis and the river Evenus. Their attempt to slip away by putting out at night had not gone unnoticed. So at this point they were forced to fight in the middle of the strait.

Each city’s contingent had its own generals, who had fitted it out. The Corinthian generals were Machaon, Isocrates and Agatharchidas. The Peloponnesians drew up their ships in as large a circle as they could without leaving room for the enemy to break through, prows outward and sterns inward. Inside the circle they placed the light boats that were sailing with them, and also five of their fastest ships, so that these could sail out at short notice and be on hand wherever the enemy attacked.

The Athenians, drawn up in single file, sailed round and round them in a circle and kept squeezing them into a smaller space. They kept brushing close past them and giving the impression that they were about to ram at any moment. Phormio had ordered them beforehand not to attack until he gave the signal. For he expected that the enemy’s formation would not hold the way an infantry line does on land, but that the ships would fall foul of one another and the small boats would cause confusion. And if the wind blew out of the gulf—he was waiting for it as he sailed round, and it usually rose toward dawn—they would not stay steady for a moment. He thought the attack was in his own hands, to make whenever he wished, since his ships were faster, and that the moment would be best then.

The wind came down, and the ships, already in a narrow space, were thrown into confusion by both the wind and the small boats pressing on them at once. Ship collided with ship, and the crews were pushing them apart with poles. Shouting, fending each other off and cursing, they could hear neither the orders nor the men calling the stroke. Being inexperienced, they could not lift their oars clear in the rough water, and so they made the ships less responsive to the helmsmen. Then, at that moment, Phormio gave the signal. The Athenians fell on them and first sank one of the generals’ flagships, then went on destroying the others wherever they came at them. They reduced them to such a state that, in the confusion, not one of them turned to fight; instead they fled to Patrae and Dyme in Achaea.

The Athenians gave chase, captured twelve ships and took most of their crews on board, and then sailed off to Molycreium. After setting up a trophy at Rhium and dedicating a ship to Poseidon, they withdrew to Naupactus. The Peloponnesians, too, immediately sailed with the rest of their ships from Dyme and Patrae along the coast to Cyllene, the port of the Eleans. After the battle at Stratus, Cnemus also arrived at Cyllene from Leucas, with the ships from there that were supposed to have joined this fleet.

Phormio, for his part, sent messengers to Athens to report the enemy’s preparations and tell of the sea battle they had won. He asked the Athenians to send him as many ships as possible, as quickly as possible, since a sea battle was expected any day. The Athenians sent him twenty ships, but instructed their commander to go to Crete first. For Nicias, a Cretan from Gortyn who was their proxenos, persuaded them to sail against Cydonia, promising to win it over, though it was hostile. In fact he was bringing them in as a favor to the Polichnitans, neighbors of the Cydonians. So the commander took the ships and went off to Crete. With the Polichnitans he ravaged the land of the Cydonians, and because of contrary winds and bad sailing weather he was held up there for no short time.

Meanwhile, while the Athenians were held up around Crete, the Peloponnesians at Cyllene, now ready for a sea battle, sailed along the coast to Panormus in Achaea, where the Peloponnesian land army had come to support them. Phormio, too, sailed along to the Molycrian Rhium and anchored off it with twenty ships, the same ones with which he had fought the battle. This Rhium was friendly to the Athenians. The other Rhium is opposite it, on the Peloponnesian side. They are about seven stades of sea apart, and this is the mouth of the Crisaean Gulf. The Achaean Rhium is not far from Panormus, where the Peloponnesians had their land forces. Once they had seen the Athenians, they too anchored there with seventy-seven ships.

For six or seven days they lay at anchor facing each other, practicing and preparing for the battle. The Peloponnesians were resolved not to sail out beyond the two Rhia into open water, fearing a repeat of their earlier disaster. The Athenians were resolved not to sail into the narrows, thinking that fighting in a confined space favored the enemy. Then Cnemus, Brasidas and the other Peloponnesian generals wanted to fight the battle quickly, before reinforcements came from Athens too. They first called the soldiers together. Seeing that most of them were frightened after their earlier defeat and had no appetite for fighting, they encouraged them and spoke as follows:

And your inexperience does not put you as far behind as your daring puts you ahead. The enemy’s skill, which you fear most, will keep its memory in the moment of danger and carry out what it has learned, if it is joined with courage. But without stoutness of heart no skill is any use against danger. For fear drives out memory, and skill without valor is worthless. So set your greater daring against their greater experience. And against the fear the defeat has caused you, set the fact that you happened to be unprepared then. You have the advantage of a larger number of ships, and of fighting close to land that is your own, with hoplites at hand. For the most part, victory goes to the more numerous and the better prepared.

So we cannot find a single point on which we would be likely to fail. The very mistakes we made before, now added to our experience, will serve as a lesson. Take heart, then, helmsmen and sailors alike. Each of you, follow orders at your own post, and do not leave the position you are assigned to. We will prepare the attack no worse than your previous leaders did, and we will give no one any excuse for cowardice. But if anyone does choose to be a coward, he will be punished with the penalty he deserves, while the brave will be honored with the fitting prizes for excellence.”

Besides, the Spartans who lead them are bringing most of them into danger against their will, for the sake of their own reputation. Otherwise, after such a heavy defeat, they would never have attempted another sea battle. So do not fear their daring. You inspire far more fear in them, and with better grounds, both because you have beaten them before and because they think you would not be standing up to them unless you meant to do something worthy of so great a disparity. Opponents who are more numerous, like these, attack relying more on their strength than on their resolve. But those who come from a much weaker position, and without being compelled to, dare to stand against them because there is great firmness in their thinking. With this in mind, they are more afraid of us for the very unreasonableness of our stand than they would be of a force reasonably matched to theirs.

Many armies, too, have fallen before smaller numbers through inexperience, and some also through lack of daring. We have no share in either. As for the battle, I will not fight it in the gulf if I can help it, nor sail into the gulf. For I see that when a few experienced and faster ships face many unskilled ones, the narrow space is a disadvantage. A ship cannot sail in properly to ram without a view of the enemy from a long way off, nor back away in time when hard pressed. There is no breaking through the line or wheeling round to attack again, which are the work of faster ships. The sea battle would inevitably turn into a land battle, and in that the larger number of ships has the upper hand.

I will take care of these things as far as I can. You must keep good order and stay by your ships. Take your orders promptly, especially since we are anchored so close to the enemy. In action, regard discipline and silence as all-important. This is useful in most military matters, and not least in a sea battle. Fight these men off in a manner worthy of what you have already achieved. The contest before you is a great one: either to destroy the Peloponnesians’ hopes for their navy, or to bring the Athenians’ fear for the sea closer to home. I remind you again that you have beaten most of them. And men who have been defeated are not willing to face the same dangers in the same spirit.”

And Phormio, as they had expected, was alarmed for the place, which was undefended. As soon as he saw them putting out, he reluctantly and hastily got his men on board and sailed along the coast, and the Messenian infantry came along to help at the same time. The Peloponnesians saw them sailing along in single file and already inside the gulf and close to land, which was exactly what they most wanted. At a single signal they suddenly turned their ships and sailed line abreast at the Athenians, each as fast as he could, hoping to cut off all their ships.

Some eleven of the Athenian ships, the ones in the lead, slipped past the Peloponnesian wing and its turning movement into open water. The rest the Peloponnesians caught. They drove them ashore as they tried to escape and disabled them, and they killed all the Athenians who did not swim to safety. Some of the ships they made fast and began towing away empty (one they had already captured with its crew). But others the Messenians recovered when they were already being towed off: they came to the rescue, waded into the sea in full armor, boarded the ships and fought from the decks.

There happened to be a merchant ship anchored out in deep water. The Athenian ship reached it first, swung round it, rammed the pursuing Leucadian ship amidships, and sank it. This was so unexpected and so contrary to all reason that panic seized the Peloponnesians. Besides, they had been pursuing in disorder because they were winning. Some of their ships dropped their oars and stopped, meaning to wait for the main body. This was a dangerous thing to do with the enemy so close and able to strike back. Others ran aground in the shallows because they did not know the waters.

When the Athenians saw this happening, they took heart, and at a single word of command they raised a shout and charged at them. Because of the mistakes they had already made and their present disorder, the Peloponnesians held out only a short time and then fled to Panormus, where they had put out from. The Athenians pursued them and captured the six ships nearest at hand. They also recovered their own ships, which the enemy had disabled close to the shore at first and taken in tow. Some of the men they killed, and some they took prisoner. On board the Leucadian ship that sank by the merchantman was Timocrates the Spartan. As the ship was going down he killed himself, and his body washed up in the harbor of Naupactus.

The Athenians withdrew and set up a trophy at the spot from which they had put out and won their victory. They took up the dead and the wreckage lying off their own shore, and gave the enemy back theirs under a truce. The Peloponnesians also set up a trophy, as victors, for the rout of the ships they had disabled near the shore; and the one ship they had captured they dedicated at Achaean Rhium beside the trophy. After this, fearing the reinforcements expected from Athens, they all sailed under cover of night into the Crisaean Gulf and to Corinth, except the Leucadians. Not long after this withdrawal, the Athenians from Crete arrived at Naupactus with the twenty ships that should have joined Phormio before the battle. And the summer ended.

For there was no fleet on guard there, and no expectation at all that the enemy would ever sail against it so suddenly. It was assumed that they would not dare even an open attack in their own time, and that if they did plan one, the Athenians could not fail to detect it in advance. Once they had decided, they set off at once. They arrived by night and launched the ships from Nisaea. But they no longer sailed for the Piraeus as they had intended, because they took fright at the danger (a wind is also said to have stopped them). Instead they sailed for the headland of Salamis that faces Megara. There was a fort on it, and a guard of three ships to prevent anything from sailing into or out of Megara. They attacked the fort, towed away the triremes empty, and fell on the rest of Salamis while its people were off their guard, and plundered it.

Fire signals warning of the enemy were raised toward Athens, and there was a panic as great as any during the war. Those in the city thought the enemy had already sailed into the Piraeus, and those in the Piraeus thought that Salamis had been taken and that the enemy were all but sailing in on them. This could easily have happened if they had been willing not to hang back, and no wind would have prevented it. At daybreak the Athenians rushed to the Piraeus in full force. They launched ships, embarked in haste and amid great uproar, and sailed with the fleet for Salamis, while they posted their infantry to guard the Piraeus.

When the Peloponnesians became aware of the relief force, they hurriedly overran most of Salamis, took prisoners and plunder and the three ships from the fort of Budorum, and sailed off in haste for Nisaea, partly because their own ships also frightened them: they had been launched after lying idle a long time and were not at all watertight. When they reached Megara they went back to Corinth on foot. The Athenians, no longer finding them off Salamis, sailed back as well. From then on they guarded the Piraeus more carefully, by closing the harbors and taking other precautions.

So, setting out from the Odrysians, he raised first the Thracians on this side of Mount Haemus and Mount Rhodope, all those he ruled as far as the sea [toward the Euxine Sea and the Hellespont]. Next he raised the Getae, beyond Haemus, and all the other peoples settled south of the river Ister, toward the coast of the Euxine Sea. The Getae and the peoples of that region border on the Scythians and are equipped like them, all of them mounted archers. He also called up many of the mountain Thracians, who are independent and carry swords. They are called the Dii, and most of them live on Rhodope. Some he won over with pay, while others came along as volunteers.note

He also raised the Agrianes and the Laeaeans and all the other Paeonian peoples he ruled; these were at the edge of his empire. Toward the Paeonians, who were already independent, the empire reached as far as the Laeaean Paeonians and the river Strymon, which flows from Mount Scombrus through the Agrianes and the Laeaeans, and [there] it had its boundary. Toward the Triballi, who were also independent, the boundary was formed by the Treres and the Tilataeans. These live north of Mount Scombrus and stretch westward as far as the river Oscius. This river flows from the same mountain as the Nestus and the Hebrus, a large, uninhabited mountain adjoining Rhodope.

The tribute from all the non-Greek territory and from the Greek cities, at the level it reached under Seuthes, who reigned after Sitalces and raised it highest, was worth about four hundred talents of silver, paid in gold and silver. Gifts of gold and silver no smaller than this were also brought in, not counting fabrics, both patterned and plain, and other goods. These went not only to the king himself but also to the lesser rulers and the nobles of the Odrysians. The Odrysians had established a custom that was the opposite of the practice of the Persian kingdom, though the other Thracians shared it too: to take rather than to give. Among them it was more shameful to be asked for something and refuse than to ask and be refused. But because of their power the Odrysians made greater use of the custom, for nothing could be accomplished there without giving gifts.

As a result the kingdom became very powerful. Of all the kingdoms in Europe between the Ionian Gulf and the Euxine Sea, it was the greatest in revenue and in general prosperity. In fighting strength and size of army, though, it came a distant second to the kingdom of the Scythians. With the Scythians no nation in Europe can be compared. Not even in Asia is there any single nation that could, one against one, stand up to the Scythians if they were all of one mind. Yet in good judgment generally, and in intelligent use of what life puts at hand, they are no match for others.

On the march his army lost no men, except some to sickness, and instead it grew. Many of the independent Thracians followed uninvited in search of plunder, so that the whole host is said to have numbered no fewer than a hundred and fifty thousand. Most of it was infantry, and about a third was cavalry. The Odrysians themselves supplied most of the cavalry, and the Getae came next. Among the infantry, the most warlike were the sword-bearers, the independent men who had come down from Rhodope. The rest of the crowd that followed was of mixed peoples and most formidable for its numbers.

So they gathered at Doberus and prepared to descend over the heights into lower Macedonia, which Perdiccas ruled. The Macedonians also include the Lyncestians, the Elimiotes and other upland peoples. These are allies and subjects of the lowland Macedonians but have kingdoms of their own. What is now coastal Macedonia was first acquired and ruled by Alexander, Perdiccas’s father, and his ancestors, who were originally Temenids from Argos. They became its kings after driving out by force the Pierians from Pieria and the Bottiaeans from the region called Bottia. The Pierians later settled Phagres and other places below Mount Pangaeum beyond the Strymon (even now the land below Pangaeum toward the sea is called the Pierian Gulf). The Bottiaeans now live as neighbors of the Chalcidians.note

They also acquired a narrow strip of Paeonia along the river Axius, reaching down from the interior to Pella and the sea. Beyond the Axius, as far as the Strymon, they hold the district called Mygdonia, having driven out the Edonians. They also drove the Eordians out of what is now called Eordia. Most of the Eordians were destroyed, but a small remnant of them is settled around Physca. And they drove the Almopians out of Almopia. These Macedonians also conquered the other peoples whose lands they still hold today: Anthemus, Grestonia, Bisaltia, and much of the land of the upland Macedonians themselves. The whole is called Macedonia, and Perdiccas son of Alexander was its king when Sitalces invaded.

Next Sitalces advanced into the rest of Macedonia, to the left of Pella and Cyrrhus. They did not get farther in than these, into Bottiaea and Pieria, but they ravaged Mygdonia, Grestonia and Anthemus. The Macedonians did not even consider defending themselves with infantry. Instead they sent for more horsemen from their allies in the uplands and charged into the Thracian army wherever they saw fit, a few against many. Wherever they struck, no one could stand up to them, since they were good horsemen and wore breastplates. But they were hemmed in by the enemy’s numbers and put themselves in danger against a host many times their size. In the end they kept quiet, not thinking themselves strong enough to risk an encounter with superior numbers.

Sitalces opened talks with Perdiccas about the reasons for his expedition. The Athenians had not arrived with their ships, because they did not believe he would come, but they had sent him gifts and envoys. So he sent part of his army against the Chalcidians and the Bottiaeans, shut them up inside their walls and ravaged their land. While he was encamped in these parts, the peoples to the south grew afraid that the army might advance against them too: the Thessalians, the Magnesians and the other subjects of the Thessalians, and the Greeks as far as Thermopylae. They made themselves ready.

The Thracians who lived on the plains beyond the Strymon to the north were also afraid: the Panaeans, the Odomanti, the Droi and the Dersaeans, all of them independent peoples. The expedition also gave rise to talk even among the Greeks who were enemies of the Athenians, who feared that the Athenians might lead this army against them under the alliance. Meanwhile Sitalces occupied Chalcidice, Bottice and Macedonia all at once and ravaged them. None of the aims of his invasion was being achieved, his army had no food, and it was suffering from the winter. So he was persuaded by Seuthes son of Sparadocus, his nephew and the most powerful man after himself, to withdraw quickly.

Perdiccas had secretly won Seuthes over by promising to give him his sister in marriage, with money besides. So Sitalces was persuaded. After staying thirty days in all, eight of them among the Chalcidians, he withdrew home with his army in haste. Later Perdiccas gave his sister Stratonice to Seuthes, as he had promised. These, then, were the events of Sitalces’ expedition.

Most of the Echinades islands also lie opposite Oeniadae, very close to the mouths of the Achelous. As a result the river, which is large, is constantly silting them up. Some of the islands have already been joined to the mainland, and it is expected that before very long all of them will be. The stream is large, full and muddy, and the islands lie close together. They bind the deposits to one another [so that they are not dispersed], because they lie staggered rather than in line and leave the water no straight passages to the open sea. The islands are uninhabited and not large.

There is also a story about Alcmaeon son of Amphiaraus. When he was wandering after murdering his mother, Apollo is said to have told him in an oracle to settle in this land. The god hinted that there would be no release from his terrors until he found a country that had not yet been seen by the sun and was not yet land at the time he killed his mother, and settled there. All the rest of the earth, the reasoning went, was polluted for him. In his perplexity, so they say, he at last noticed this deposit of the Achelous. It seemed to him that enough land to keep him alive would have been piled up during the long time he had been wandering since killing his mother. So he settled in the region around Oeniadae, became its ruler, and left the country the name it took from his son Acarnan. That is the story about Alcmaeon as it has come down to us.note

The Athenians were worn down by the plague and by the war, which had only just got under way and was now at its height. They thought it a serious matter to take on Lesbos as an enemy as well, with its fleet and its forces intact. At first they would not accept the accusations, giving more weight to their wish that they not be true. But when they sent envoys as well and still could not persuade the Mytileneans to abandon the concentration and the preparations, they took fright and wanted to strike first. Without warning they sent forty ships that happened to be fitted out to sail round the Peloponnese. Cleippides son of Deinias was in command, with two colleagues. Word had reached them that there was a festival of Apollo Maloeis outside the city, which the Mytileneans celebrate with the whole population, and that if they made haste there was hope of falling on them unexpectedly. If the attempt came off, well and good. If not, they were to tell the Mytileneans to hand over their ships and pull down their walls, and if they did not comply, to make war on them.note

So the ships set off. The ten Mytilenean triremes that happened to be serving with the Athenians as auxiliaries under the terms of the alliance were detained by the Athenians, who put their crews under guard. But a man crossed from Athens to Euboea, went on foot to Geraestus, and found a merchant ship putting out to sea. He took passage, reached Mytilene on the third day out from Athens, and reported the coming attack to the Mytileneans. They did not go out to the sanctuary of Maloeis. They barricaded the half-finished parts of their walls and harbors and otherwise kept on guard.

Not long afterward the Athenians sailed in. When they saw how matters stood, the generals delivered their instructions, and when the Mytileneans would not listen, they began the war. The Mytileneans were unprepared and suddenly forced to fight. They made a kind of sortie with their ships, as if for a sea battle, a short way in front of the harbor. Then, after being chased back by the Attic ships, they promptly opened talks with the generals, hoping, if they could, to get the ships sent away for the present on some reasonable terms. The Athenian generals accepted, because they were themselves afraid that they were not strong enough to fight the whole of Lesbos.

An armistice was made, and the Mytileneans sent to Athens one of the informers, who by now regretted what he had done, along with others, to see whether they could somehow persuade the Athenians to recall the ships, on the grounds that they themselves would stir up no revolution. Meanwhile they also sent envoys to Sparta in a trireme, slipping past the Athenian fleet, which lay at anchor at Malea, north of the city. They had no confidence that the mission to Athens would succeed. These envoys had a hard voyage across the open sea, reached Sparta, and worked to get some help sent.

When the envoys came back from Athens having achieved nothing, the Mytileneans and the rest of Lesbos, apart from Methymna, went to war. The Methymnaeans had come to the help of the Athenians, as had the Imbrians and the Lemnians and a few of the other allies. The Mytileneans made a sortie in full force against the Athenian camp, and a battle took place. The Mytileneans did not have the worse of it, yet they neither camped on the field nor trusted in themselves, but withdrew. After that they kept quiet, wanting to take risks only if reinforcements came from the Peloponnese and they had additional forces. For Meleas, a Laconian, and Hermaeondas, a Theban, had now arrived. They had been sent out before the revolt, but since they could not get there ahead of the Athenian expedition, they sailed in secretly in a trireme after the battle. They urged the Mytileneans to send another trireme and envoys back with them, and the Mytileneans did so.

The Athenians were greatly encouraged by the Mytileneans’ inaction. They summoned allies, who came much more quickly when they saw that there was no strength on the Lesbian side. Moving their ships round to anchor on the south side of the city, they fortified two camps, one on each side of the city, and set up blockades at both harbors. They kept the Mytileneans off the sea. On land, the Mytileneans and the other Lesbians, who had by now come to their help, controlled the rest of the country, while the Athenians held only the small area around their camps. Malea served them rather as an anchorage for their ships and as a market. That was how the war around Mytilene was being fought.

When the people did not come over, he dismissed the land forces and sailed himself to Leucas. He made a landing at Nericus, and on his way back he was killed, together with part of his force, by the people of the area, who rallied to the defense, and by a few garrison troops. The Athenians sailed away, and afterward recovered their dead from the Leucadians under a truce.

As long as they led us on equal terms, we followed them eagerly. But when we saw them relaxing their hostility toward the Persians and moving to enslave the allies, we were no longer free of fear. The allies, unable to unite and defend themselves because there were so many separate votes, were enslaved, all except us and the Chians. We went on campaigning with them, supposedly autonomous and free in name. We no longer trusted the Athenians as leaders, for we took what had already happened as our guide. It was not likely that they would subdue those whom they had made parties to the treaty along with us, and not do the same to those who remained, if ever they had the power.

If we had all still been autonomous, we would have been surer that they would attempt no revolutionary change. But they had most of the allies under their control while dealing with us on equal terms. Naturally, then, they were going to find it harder to bear that our position alone still stood on a par with theirs, when the majority had already given way. This was all the more true as they grew more powerful and we more isolated. Only fear that is evenly matched makes an alliance reliable, for whoever wants to break faith is deterred by not having the advantage if he attacks. And we were left autonomous for no other reason than this: with their empire in view, they saw that they could get their way more by specious argument and by working on opinion than by force.

On the one hand, they used us as evidence that states with an equal vote would not be joining their campaigns against their will unless those they attacked were in the wrong. By the same means they led the strongest states along with them against the weaker ones first. By leaving the strongest to the last, when everything else around them had been stripped away, they would find them weaker. If they had begun with us, while all the allies still had their own strength and something to rally around, they would not have subdued them so easily. Our navy, too, caused them some fear that it might one day unite and join either you or someone else, and become a danger to them. We also survived partly by courting their people and whoever their leaders happened to be at the time. But we did not think we could hold out for long, if this war had not broken out, judging by the examples of how they treated the others.

What kind of friendship or reliable freedom was this, in which we received each other against our true feelings? They courted us in wartime because they were afraid of us, and we did the same to them in peacetime. In other cases it is goodwill above all that makes trust secure, but in ours it was fear that made it firm. We were held together as allies more by fear than by friendship, and whichever side first gained confidence from feeling safe was going to be the first to break the agreement in some way.

So if anyone thinks we did wrong in revolting first, over harm they were only intending to do us, without waiting ourselves to know for certain whether any of it would happen, he is not judging the matter rightly. If we had been able, on equal terms, to plot against them in return and to bide our time in return, why should we, their equals, have been at their mercy? But since the power to attack always lies with them, the power to defend ourselves in advance must lie with us.

Our revolt, however, came sooner than we planned, and before we were prepared. All the more reason, then, for you to take us as allies and send help quickly, so that you may be seen both to defend those you ought to defend and at the same time to harm your enemies. The moment is right as never before. The Athenians have been ravaged by the plague and drained by their spending. Some of their ships are around your territory, and others are deployed against us. So they are not likely to have any ships to spare if this summer you invade a second time, with ships and land forces at once. Either they will not resist you when you sail against them, or they will withdraw from both places. And let no one think that he will be running a risk of his own for the sake of someone else’s land.

The man to whom Lesbos seems far away will find that the advantage it brings is close at hand. The war will not be fought in Attica, as some people suppose, but in the places from which Attica draws its strength. Their revenue comes from the allies, and it will be greater still if they subdue us. No one else will revolt, our resources will be added to theirs, and we would suffer worse than those who were enslaved before us. But if you help us wholeheartedly, you will gain a city with a large navy, which is what you most need. You will bring down the Athenians more easily by taking their allies away from them, for everyone will come over to you more boldly. And you will escape the charge you have faced, of not helping those who revolt. If you are seen to be liberators, your hold on victory in the war will be firmer.

The Athenians saw that the Spartans were making these preparations because they judged Athens to be weak. They wanted to show that this judgment was wrong, and that without moving the fleet off Lesbos they could easily repel the force coming from the Peloponnese as well. So they manned a hundred ships, and they went aboard themselves, all except the cavalry class and the pentacosiomedimni, together with the metics. They sailed along the Isthmus, made a show of their strength, and landed on the Peloponnese wherever they pleased.note

The Spartans saw much that went against their expectations. They concluded that what the Lesbians had told them was not true and judged the plan impracticable. Their allies had not turned up together with them, and news came as well that the thirty Athenian ships around the Peloponnese were plundering the territory of their perioeci. So they went back home. Later they began preparing a fleet to send to Lesbos. They ordered the cities to supply forty ships in all and appointed Alcidas admiral, to sail with it. The Athenians, too, withdrew with their hundred ships once they saw that the Spartans had gone.

[At the time when these ships were at sea, the Athenians had about the largest number of ships in active service at once that they ever had, and in the finest trim, though they had as many or even more at the start of the war. A hundred guarded Attica, Euboea and Salamis, and another hundred were around the Peloponnese, besides those at Potidaea and in other places. So in a single summer there were two hundred and fifty in all at once. This, together with Potidaea, was what drained their funds most. Potidaea was garrisoned by hoplites paid two drachmas a day, for each man received a drachma a day for himself and one for his attendant. There were three thousand at first, and no fewer than that number stayed to the end of the siege. Another sixteen hundred were with Phormio, and they left before the end. All the ships drew the same pay. In this way, then, their money was drained at first, and this was the largest number of ships they manned.]note

At the same time as the Spartans were at the Isthmus, the Mytileneans marched by land against Methymna, both they and their mercenaries, believing it was about to be betrayed to them. They attacked the city, but when things did not go as they had expected, they went off to Antissa, Pyrrha and Eresus. There they put affairs in these cities on a firmer footing and strengthened the walls, and then went home in haste. Once they had withdrawn, the Methymnaeans in their turn marched against Antissa. But the Antissaeans and the mercenaries made a sally and beat them: many were killed, and the rest hurried back.note

When the Athenians learned of this, that the Mytileneans were masters of the land and that their own soldiers were not enough to hem them in, they sent out Paches son of Epicurus as general, just as autumn was beginning, with a thousand of their own hoplites. These men rowed their ships themselves. On arrival they walled Mytilene round with a single wall, and at some points on strong ground forts were built into it. So Mytilene was now firmly shut in on both sides, by land and by sea, and the winter was beginning.

They made ladders equal in height to the enemy’s wall. They worked out the height by counting the courses of bricks, at a place where the wall facing them happened not to be plastered over. Many men counted the courses at the same time. Some were bound to get it wrong, but most would arrive at the true figure, especially as they counted many times and were not far away either, but could easily see the part of the wall they wanted. In this way, then, they got the measurement for the ladders, calculating it from the thickness of a brick.

The Peloponnesian wall was built as follows. It had two circuits, one facing Plataea and the other facing outward in case anyone attacked from Athens, and the two circuits were about sixteen feet apart. This space between them [the sixteen feet] had been built up with quarters allotted to the guards. These were continuous, so that it looked like a single thick wall with battlements on both sides. At every tenth battlement there were large towers, as wide as the wall, reaching to both its inner and its outer face, so that there was no way past a tower alongside it; men went through the middle of the towers. So on nights of wet, stormy weather they left the battlements and kept watch from the towers, which were not far apart and were roofed over. Such, then, was the wall by which the Plataeans were shut in.

When their preparations were complete, they waited for a night that was stormy with rain and wind and moonless as well, and went out. They were led by the very men who had been responsible for the attempt. First they crossed the ditch that surrounded them. Then they reached the enemy’s wall without being seen by the guards. In the darkness the guards could not see them coming, and they did not hear the noise of their approach because the wind drowned it with its own rattling. The men also kept well apart as they went, so that their weapons would not knock against each other and give them away.

They were lightly equipped, and had a shoe on the left foot only, to keep a firm footing in the mud. They came up to the battlements at a point between two towers, knowing that the battlements were unmanned. First came the men carrying the ladders, who set them against the wall. Then twelve lightly armed men with daggers and breastplates went up, led by Ammeas son of Coroebus, who was the first to climb. After him his followers went up, six toward each of the two towers. After these came other light troops with javelins. Others behind them carried their shields, so that they could climb more easily, and were to hand them over when they were up against the enemy.

When more of them had got to the top, the guards in the towers noticed them. One of the Plataeans, grabbing hold of the battlements, had knocked off a tile, which crashed as it fell. At once there was shouting, and the army rushed to the wall, for on a dark and stormy night it did not know what the danger was. At the same time the Plataeans left behind in the city came out and attacked the Peloponnesian wall on the side opposite to where their own men were climbing over, so that the enemy would pay as little attention to the climbers as possible.

So there was confusion, though the men stayed at their posts. No one dared leave his own station to help; they were at a loss to guess what was happening. Their three hundred, who had been assigned to bring help wherever it might be needed, went outside the wall toward the shouting. Fire signals warning of an enemy attack were raised toward Thebes. But the Plataeans in the city also raised many fire signals from their own wall, which they had prepared beforehand for this very purpose. They wanted to make the enemy’s signals unclear, so that the Thebans would take what was happening for something other than what it was, and would not come to help before their own men who were going out had escaped and reached safety.

Meanwhile the Plataeans who were climbing over had their first men up. These killed the guards of both towers and took control of them. They posted themselves in the towers’ passageways and held them, so that no one could come through to help. Then they set ladders from the wall against the towers and brought more men up. Those on the towers kept off the enemy coming to help with missiles, both from below and from above, while the majority set up many ladders, pushed down the battlements and crossed over through the space between the towers. Each man, as he got across, halted on the edge of the ditch, and from there they shot arrows and threw javelins at anyone who came along the wall to help and tried to block the crossing.

When they had all got across, the last men came down from the towers with difficulty and made for the ditch, and at that moment the three hundred bore down on them carrying torches. The Plataeans, standing out of the darkness on the edge of the ditch, could see them all the better, and shot arrows and threw javelins at their unprotected sides. They themselves were in the dark, and the torches made them harder to see. So even the last of the Plataeans got across the ditch in time, though with difficulty and a hard struggle. For ice had formed in it that was not firm enough to walk on, but slushy, as it is when the wind is east [or north]. The night, with snow falling in such a wind, had also filled the ditch with water, and they barely kept their heads above it as they crossed. In fact, their escape owed more than anything to the severity of the storm.

Setting off from the ditch, the Plataeans went in a body along the road leading to Thebes, keeping the shrine of the hero Androcrates on their right. They thought that this road, the one toward the enemy, was the last one they would be suspected of taking. At the same time they could see the Peloponnesians pursuing with torches along the road toward Cithaeron and Dryoscephalae, the one leading to Athens. For six or seven stades the Plataeans went along the Thebes road. Then they turned off and took the road leading to the mountains, toward Erythrae and Hysiae. Reaching the hills, they escaped to Athens: two hundred and twelve men out of a larger number.note

Some of them had turned back to the city before climbing over, and one, an archer, was captured at the outer ditch. The Peloponnesians, then, returned to their posts and gave up their efforts to help. The Plataeans in the city knew nothing of what had happened, and those who had turned back reported to them that no one had survived. So when day came they sent out a herald and asked for a truce to take up the dead, but on learning the truth they let it drop. In this way, then, these men of Plataea climbed over and were saved.

In Attica they ravaged what had been cut down before, [and] whatever had grown up again, and whatever had been passed over in the earlier invasions. This invasion was the hardest on the Athenians after the second. The Peloponnesians kept waiting to hear from Lesbos of some action by the ships, which they supposed had crossed by now, and so they pressed on, ravaging most of the country. But when none of the things they expected happened and their food had run out, they withdrew and dispersed to their cities.

Those in charge of affairs realized that they could not stop this, and that they would be in danger if they were left out of the agreement. So together with the people they made an agreement with Paches and the army. Under it the Athenians were to be free to decide whatever they wished about the Mytileneans, and the Mytileneans were to receive the army into the city and send an embassy to Athens to plead their own case. Until the envoys came back, Paches was not to imprison, enslave or put to death any Mytilenean.

This was the agreement that was made. But the Mytileneans who had been most involved in the dealings with the Spartans were terrified, and when the army entered they could not contain themselves, and sat down at the altars in spite of it. Paches raised them up, promising not to harm them, and placed them on Tenedos until the Athenians should reach a decision. He also sent triremes to Antissa and won it over, and he settled the other military matters as he thought best.note

Putting out from Embatum, he sailed along the coast. He put in at Myonnesus, which belongs to the people of Teos, and there he slaughtered most of the prisoners he had taken on the voyage. When he anchored at Ephesus, envoys came to him from the Samians at Anaia. They told him that this was no fine way to free Greece, killing men who had neither raised a hand against him nor were his enemies, but were allies of the Athenians by compulsion. If he did not stop, they said, he would win over few of his enemies to friendship and turn far more of his friends into enemies. He was persuaded, and released the Chians he still held and some of the others. These people had not fled when they saw the ships. They had come up to them instead, taking them for Athenian. They had not the slightest expectation that, while the Athenians controlled the sea, Peloponnesian ships would ever cross over to Ionia.note

From Ephesus Alcidas sailed off in haste, making his departure a flight. He had been sighted by the Salaminia and the Paralus while still anchored off Clarus, for they happened to be sailing from Athens. Fearing pursuit, he sailed across the open sea, meaning to touch land of his own accord nowhere but in the Peloponnese.note

On his way back along the coast he also put in at Notium, the port of the Colophonians. Colophonians had settled there after their upper city was captured by Itamenes and the non-Greeks, who had been brought in by one side in a local factional quarrel. It was captured at about the time the second Peloponnesian invasion of Attica was taking place. Now those who had taken refuge and settled at Notium fell into civil strife once again. One side brought in mercenaries from Pissuthnes, Arcadians and non-Greeks, and kept them in a walled-off quarter; and those Colophonians from the upper city who had sided with the Persians came in with them and ran the city. The other side, who had slipped away from them and were in exile, called in Paches.note

Paches invited Hippias, the commander of the Arcadians in the walled quarter, to a parley, on the understanding that if he said nothing acceptable, Paches would put him back in the fort safe and sound. Hippias came out to him. Paches kept him under guard, though not in chains, and himself made a sudden attack on the fort while they were not expecting it, took it, and killed the Arcadians and all the non-Greeks who were inside. Afterward he brought Hippias into the fort, as he had agreed, and once he was inside, seized him and shot him down with arrows. He handed Notium over to the Colophonians, except for those who had sided with the Persians. Later the Athenians sent out founders and resettled Notium under their own laws, gathering in all the Colophonians to be found anywhere in the cities.

When the men and Salaethus arrived, the Athenians put Salaethus to death at once, although he offered, among other things, to get the Peloponnesians to withdraw from Plataea, which was still under siege. About the men they held a debate, and in their anger they decided to kill not only those who were there but all the adult men of Mytilene, and to enslave the women and children. They held the revolt against them as a whole, because they had made it without being subjects like the others; and what added not a little to their fury was that the Peloponnesian ships had dared to venture all the way to Ionia to help them, for the revolt did not seem to have been undertaken on a moment’s impulse. So they sent a trireme to Paches to announce what had been decided, with orders to make an end of the Mytileneans quickly.

The very next day, however, a change of heart came over them, and they began to reckon that the decision they had made was cruel and monstrous: to destroy a whole city rather than only those responsible. When the Mytilenean envoys who were in Athens and the Athenians who were working with them became aware of this, they got the authorities to put the matter to debate again. They persuaded them the more easily because it was plain to the authorities too that most of the citizens wanted someone to give them the chance to deliberate again. An assembly was called at once, and various opinions were put forward by different speakers. Among them was Cleon son of Cleaenetus, who had carried the earlier motion to put them to death. He was the most violent of the citizens in other respects as well, and at that time by far the most persuasive with the people; he came forward again and spoke as follows:note

Most dreadful of all is the prospect that nothing we decide will stand firm, and that we will not recognize that a city with worse laws that are kept unchanged is stronger than one with good laws that have no authority; that lack of learning joined with self-restraint is more useful than cleverness joined with indiscipline; and that ordinary people, compared with the more intelligent, generally run their cities better.

For the clever want to appear wiser than the laws and to outdo every speech made in public debate, as though there were no weightier matters in which to show off their judgment; and by behaving like this they usually bring their cities to grief. The others, distrusting their own intelligence, are content to be less learned than the laws and less able to find fault with the arguments of a fine speaker; and being impartial judges rather than competitors, they mostly get things right. That, then, is how we too should act, instead of being carried away by cleverness and contests of wit into giving you, the people, advice that goes against our own judgment.

Clearly he will either trust in his eloquence and strive to prove that what has been thoroughly decided has not been decided at all, or else, spurred on by gain, he will labor to produce a specious speech and try to lead you astray. In contests of this kind the city gives the prizes to others and bears the risks itself. You are to blame, for staging these contests badly. You are in the habit of being spectators of words and listeners to deeds. You judge future deeds possible because fine speakers say so; and as for deeds already done, you do not take what was done, which you saw with your own eyes, as more credible than what you have heard, but rely on those who have criticized it in fine words.

You are the best at being deceived by novelty in argument and at refusing to follow what has been tested; you are slaves to every new paradox and scorners of the familiar. Each of you wants above all to be able to speak himself, and failing that, you compete with those who make such speeches so as not to seem to lag behind in following their thought. You applaud a sharp point before it is even made, and you are as quick to anticipate what is being said as you are slow to foresee its consequences. You are looking, so to speak, for some world other than the one we live in, yet you do not think adequately even about what is in front of you. In short, you are overcome by the pleasure of listening, and are more like an audience sitting at a display by sophists than men deliberating about their city.note

And yet that is more dreadful than if they had built up power of their own and made war on us. The disasters of their neighbors, those who have already revolted from us and been subdued, were no lesson to them, nor did the prosperity they enjoyed make them hesitate before running into danger. Growing overconfident about the future, and forming hopes that went beyond their power though they fell short of their ambition, they took up war, thinking fit to put strength before justice. For at the moment they thought they would prevail, they attacked us, without having been wronged. It is usual for cities to which prosperity comes most unexpectedly and most suddenly to turn to arrogance. In general, good fortune that comes to people as calculation would lead them to expect is safer than good fortune beyond expectation; and men, one might say, find it easier to fend off adversity than to preserve prosperity.

The Mytileneans ought long ago to have been treated by us no differently from the others, and then they would not have gone to such lengths of arrogance; for it is human nature in any case to despise those who court one and to admire those who do not give way. Let them be punished now as their crime deserves, and do not lay the blame on the few while you acquit the people. For they all attacked you alike—though they could have turned to our side and would now be back in their city. Instead they reckoned that the risk shared with the few was the safer one, and joined in the revolt.

Consider your allies. If you impose the same penalties on those forced to revolt by the enemy and on those who revolt of their own accord, who do you think will not revolt on the slightest pretext, when success brings freedom and failure brings no irreparable harm? We, meanwhile, will have to risk our money and our lives against each city in turn. If you succeed, you will take over a ruined city and lose for the future its revenue, which is the source of our strength; if we fail, we will have new enemies on top of those we already have, and the time we ought to spend resisting our present enemies we will spend fighting our own allies.

the orators who charm us with their words can have their contest on other, less important matters, not on one where the city will pay a great penalty for a brief pleasure while they themselves are well rewarded for speaking well; and leniency is better shown to those who are going to be our friends in the future than to those who will remain just as they are and no less our enemies. To sum it up in a word: if you are persuaded by me, you will do what is just toward the Mytileneans and at the same time what is in your interest; if you decide otherwise, you will not win their gratitude, and you will rather be passing sentence on yourselves. For if these people were right to revolt, then you would be wrong to rule.

If, however, you think fit to rule even though you have no right to, then these people too must be punished to suit your interest, fair or not—or else you must give up your empire and play the good man in safety. Resolve to pay them back with the same penalty, and do not show yourselves, who escaped, less sensitive than those who plotted against you. Consider what they would likely have done if they had defeated you, especially since they were the aggressors. It is above all those who harm someone without cause who pursue him all the way to destruction, wary of the danger from an enemy left alive; for a man who has suffered without necessity is more dangerous if he escapes than an enemy on equal terms.

Hardest of all to deal with are those who go further and accuse a speaker of putting on a display for money. If they charged him only with ignorance, the speaker who failed to persuade would leave seeming more unintelligent than dishonest; but when dishonesty is alleged, he is suspected if he persuades, and if he fails he is thought not only unintelligent but dishonest as well. The city gains nothing from this, for fear robs it of its advisers. It would do best if citizens of this sort were incapable of speaking, for then people would least often be persuaded into making mistakes.

The good citizen ought not to intimidate his opponents, but to show himself the better speaker on equal terms. The sensible city ought not to give added honor to the man who most often gives good advice, but not to diminish the honor he already has either; and as for the man whose proposal fails, it ought not only not to punish him but not even to disgrace him. In this way the successful speaker would be least likely to say anything against his own judgment to please the people, in the hope of still greater honors, and the unsuccessful one would be least likely to strive by the same means, by gratifying them, to win the people over to himself.

But given how much is at stake, and in such a situation, you must expect us speakers to talk with somewhat more foresight than you who take only a short view, especially since we are accountable for our advice, while you are not accountable for how you listen. If the man who persuaded and those who followed him suffered alike, you would judge more prudently. As it is, whenever you meet with failure, you sometimes punish, in whatever anger you happen to feel, the single judgment of the man who persuaded you, and not your own judgments, many as they were, which shared in the error.

As for the point Cleon insists on most, that it will be in our interest for the future to make death the penalty so that there are fewer revolts, I too insist on what is best for the future, and I hold the opposite view. And I ask you not to reject the usefulness of my argument because of the attractiveness of his. For his argument, seeming more just in view of your present anger against the Mytileneans, might well win you over; but we are not taking them to court, where we would need what is just. We are deliberating about them, and how they may be useful to us.

Either, then, some terror more dreadful than this must be found, or this one at any rate restrains nothing. Poverty makes men daring through necessity. Abundance makes them grasping through insolence and pride. The other conditions of life each hold men in the grip of some irresistible master passion, and through their passions they are driven into danger. Hope and desire are present in every case, desire leading and hope following; desire devises the plan, and hope suggests that chance will supply the means. These do the most harm, and because they are unseen they are stronger than the dangers that can be seen.

Chance contributes no less than these to carry men away. She sometimes presents herself unexpectedly and leads a man to take a risk even when his means are inferior. This is no less true of cities, since the stakes are the greatest ones, freedom or rule over others, and each man, acting together with everyone else, irrationally overrates himself. In short, it is impossible, and very naive, for anyone to believe that when human nature is eagerly set on doing something, it can be turned back by the force of laws or by any other terror.

It is by this revenue that we are strong against our enemies. So we must not act as strict judges of the offenders and harm ourselves. We should rather see how, by punishing in moderation, we shall be able in future to make use of cities that are strong in financial terms. We should seek our security not in the severity of our laws but in the vigilance of our deeds. At present we do the opposite. If we subdue some free people who were ruled by force and have quite naturally revolted to win independence, we think we must take harsh revenge. But the right course with free people is not to punish them severely when they revolt. It is to watch them severely before they revolt and forestall them, so that they never even come to think of it, and when we have subdued them, to lay the blame on as few as possible.

when they bring their cities to revolt, they will at once have the people as their allies, because you will have shown in advance that the same penalty is laid down for the guilty and the innocent alike. Even if the people did do wrong, we should pretend not to notice, so that the one element still allied to us does not become our enemy. I believe it is far more advantageous for holding on to our empire that we should willingly suffer wrong than that we should justly destroy those we ought not to destroy. Cleon claims that the same punishment is both just and advantageous, but in this case the two prove impossible to achieve at once.

The other men, whom Paches had sent to Athens as the people most to blame for the revolt, the Athenians put to death on Cleon’s motion; there were a little more than a thousand of them. They also pulled down the walls of Mytilene and took over its ships. Later they did not impose tribute on the Lesbians. Instead they divided the land, except that of Methymna, into three thousand lots. Three hundred of these they set apart as sacred to the gods, and to the rest they sent out cleruchs of their own, chosen by lot. The Lesbians agreed to pay these men two minas of silver a year for each lot and worked the land themselves. The Athenians also took over the towns on the mainland that the Mytileneans had controlled, and these were afterward subject to Athens. That was how things went on Lesbos.note

So he first used siege engines from the sea to capture two towers projecting from the Nisaea side. This opened up the passage into the channel between the island and the shore. He then also walled off the approach from the mainland, where help could reach the island by a bridge across a shallow marsh, since the island is not far from the mainland. When they had finished this work in a few days, he left a fort and a garrison on the island as well and withdrew with his army.

That was what the herald said, and the Plataeans, who were by now at their weakest, surrendered the city. The Peloponnesians fed the Plataeans for some days, until the judges from Sparta, five men, arrived. When they came, no charge was brought. Instead they summoned the Plataeans and asked them only this: whether they had done the Spartans and their allies any good [at all] in the present war. The Plataeans asked to speak at greater length and put forward from among themselves Astymachus son of Asopolaus and Lacon son of Aeimnestus, who was the Spartans’ proxenos. These came forward and spoke as follows:

Since we are at a loss on every side, we are compelled to speak, and it seems safer to say something and take the risk. For men in our situation, a speech left unspoken might later give rise to the reproach that it would have saved them had it been made. Besides everything else, persuasion itself is hard for us. If we did not know each other, we might help ourselves by bringing evidence of things you knew nothing about. As it is, everything will be said to people who already know it. What we fear is not that you have already judged our excellence inferior to yours and are making that the charge against us. We fear that, to please others, we are being brought before a verdict already decided.

Nevertheless, we shall present the just claims we have, both regarding our quarrel with the Thebans and with respect to you and the rest of the Greeks. We shall remind you of the good we have done and try to persuade you.

Although we are an inland people, we fought in the sea battle at Artemisium. In the battle fought on our own land we stood beside you and Pausanias. Whatever other danger arose for the Greeks at that time, we took part in all of it beyond our strength. And to you in particular, Spartans, when Sparta was gripped by the greatest fear after the earthquake, when the helots had revolted and withdrawn to Ithome, we sent a third of our own men to help. It would not be right to forget these things.note

And yet, if they seem useful to you now, we and the other Greeks were far more useful then, when you were in greater danger. Now it is you who go on the attack and threaten others. But at that moment, when the foreign invader was bringing slavery upon everyone, these men were on his side. It is just to set our zeal then against our error now, if indeed we have committed any error. You will find the zeal greater than the fault. It was shown at a time when it was rare for any Greek to set his courage against the power of Xerxes. And those were praised more highly who did not look to their own advantage and safety in the face of the invasion but were willing to dare the best course amid dangers.

We were among these and were honored among the foremost, and now we fear we shall be destroyed for the very same things, for having chosen the Athenians justly rather than you for profit. Yet you ought to be seen judging the same things consistently in the same way. You ought to regard as advantageous nothing other than this: that good allies should always keep secure your gratitude for their excellence, while your immediate interest is also served in some way.

This is the depth of misfortune we have reached. When the Persians prevailed, we were ruined; and now, before you who were once our dearest friends, we are being worsted by the Thebans. We have faced two of the greatest ordeals: then, the threat of being destroyed by famine if we did not surrender the city; now, a trial for our lives. We Plataeans, who were devoted to the Greeks beyond our strength, have been thrust aside by everyone, deserted and with no one to avenge us. None of our allies of that time helps us, and you, Spartans, our only hope, we fear are not steadfast.

So by granting us our lives you would be judging in accordance with what is sacred. Bear in mind that we surrendered of our own will and held out our hands to you, and the law among the Greeks is not to kill such people, and moreover that we have been your benefactors throughout. Look at the tombs of your fathers, who were killed by the Persians and buried in our land. Every year we honored them at public expense with garments and the other customary rites, bringing them the first fruits of everything our land produced in season, as friends from a friendly country and as allies to men who were once our comrades in arms.

If you judged wrongly, you would do the opposite. Consider: Pausanias buried them believing that he was laying them in friendly soil and among men like us. But if you kill us and make the land of Plataea Theban, what else will you be doing but leaving your fathers and kinsmen in hostile ground among their murderers, deprived of the honors they now receive? What is more, you will enslave the land in which the Greeks won their freedom. You will leave desolate the temples of the gods to whom they prayed before they defeated the Persians, and you will take away the ancestral sacrifices from those who established and founded them.

For our part, as is fitting for us and as our need compels, we beg you to be persuaded in this, and we call upon the gods whom the Greeks worship in common at shared altars. We hold before you the oaths your fathers swore, and we ask you not to forget them. We become suppliants at your fathers’ tombs, and we call upon the dead not to let us fall into the power of the Thebans, nor to let their dearest friends be handed over to their bitterest enemies. We remind you, too, of that day on which we achieved the most glorious deeds alongside them, we who now, on this day, are in danger of suffering the most terrible fate.

Now we must do what is necessary and yet hardest for people in our position: bring our speech to an end, since with its end the danger to our lives also draws near. In closing, we say this. It was not to the Thebans that we surrendered our city. Rather than that, we would have chosen to die of starvation, the most shameful of deaths. We came over to you, trusting you. And it is only just, if we cannot persuade you, that you restore us to our former position and let us choose for ourselves whatever danger befalls us. At the same time we solemnly charge you, Spartans: do not let us, the Plataeans, who were the most zealous of all in the cause of the Greeks, be handed over out of your hands and your good faith, suppliants as we are, to the Thebans, our bitterest enemies. Become our saviors instead, and do not destroy us while you are freeing the rest of the Greeks.”

These men hoped to increase their private power still further if the Persian cause prevailed, and so, holding the people down by force, they brought him in. The city as a whole did this when it was not its own master, and it is not right to reproach it for errors it committed when it was not living under laws. At any rate, after the Persian had gone and the city had recovered its laws, you should consider what happened next. When the Athenians later attacked the rest of Greece and tried to bring our country too under their control, and through civil strife already held most of it, did we not fight them at Coronea, defeat them and free Boeotia? And are we not now eagerly helping to free the others, supplying cavalry and forces on a scale that none of the other allies can match?note

But you chose the Athenian side willingly, no longer under any compulsion. You say it would have been shameful to betray your benefactors. Yet it was far more shameful and more unjust to betray all the Greeks, with whom you had sworn an oath, than to betray the Athenians alone, when the Athenians were enslaving Greece and the others were freeing it. And the favor you returned them was not equal to theirs, nor free of disgrace. You called them in, as you say, because you were being wronged; but you became their accomplices in wronging others. Yet what is shameful is failing to return like favors for like, not failing to repay favors that were owed in justice but can be repaid only by doing wrong.

You made it plain that even back then it was not for the sake of the Greeks that you alone did not side with the Persians, but because the Athenians did not either: you wanted to do as they did and the opposite of what we did. And now you expect to profit from the good conduct you displayed thanks to others. That is unreasonable. As you chose the Athenians, so fight on their side, and do not bring up the sworn alliance made back then as though it ought to save you now. For you abandoned it, and in breaking it you helped to enslave the Aeginetans and some others of those who had sworn it, instead of trying to prevent it. And you did this not against your will, but living under the same laws you have kept down to the present day, with no one forcing you, as someone forced us.

And the last proposal we made to you before you were walled in, that you should keep quiet and help neither side, you refused. Who, then, could more justly be hated by all the Greeks than you, who put your valor on display to their harm? The good qualities you once showed, as you claim, you have now proved are not truly yours; and what your nature always wanted has been exposed for what it really is. For you went along with the Athenians when they took the path of injustice.

As for the latest wrong you say you have suffered, that we came against your city unlawfully, during a truce and at a time of sacred festival, we do not think that in this either we were more at fault than you. If we had come on our own, attacked your city and ravaged your land as enemies, we would be in the wrong. But if men of yours, the first among you in wealth and birth, wishing to end your alliance abroad and to restore you to the ancestral institutions shared by all the Boeotians, called us in of their own free will, what wrong are we doing?

For it is those who lead who break the law, more than those who follow. But in our judgment neither they nor we did wrong. They were citizens like you, with more at stake than you. They opened their own walls and brought us into their own city as friends, not as enemies. They wanted the worse among you to go no further, and the better to have what they deserved. They were bringing your thinking to its senses without banishing any of you from the city, bringing you home into kinship with us, making you enemies of no one and at peace by treaty with all alike.

Here is proof that we did not act as enemies: we harmed no one, and we publicly invited anyone who wished to live as a citizen under the ancestral institutions of all the Boeotians to come over to us. You gladly accepted, made a settlement with us, and at first kept quiet. But later you realized that we were few. Even supposing we did seem to have acted rather unfairly in entering without the consent of your people, you did not return like for like, using no force but persuading us by argument to leave. Instead, you attacked us in breach of the settlement. For those you killed in the fighting we do not grieve so much, since they suffered according to a kind of law. But those who held out their hands, whom you took alive and then promised us not to kill, and afterward killed in defiance of the law: how can you say you have not done a terrible thing?

You committed these three crimes in a short space of time: you broke the settlement, you then killed the men, and you broke your promise to us not to kill them if we did no harm to your property in the countryside. And yet you claim that it is we who broke the law, and you expect not to pay the penalty yourselves. No, not if these judges decide rightly. You will be punished for all of these things.

Pity is better deserved by those who suffer undeservedly; those who suffer justly, as these men do, deserve on the contrary to have their misfortune rejoiced over. Their present desolation, too, is of their own making, for they willingly rejected the better allies. They broke the law without having first been wronged by us, deciding out of hatred rather than justice, and even now they are not paying a penalty equal to their crime. For they will suffer a lawful punishment, and not as men holding out their hands after a battle, as they claim, but as men who handed themselves over to a trial by agreement.

So uphold, Spartans, the law of the Greeks that these men have violated, and give us, who have suffered lawless treatment, a just return for the zeal we have shown. Do not let their words thrust us aside in your esteem. Instead, show the Greeks by your example that the contests you set will be contests of deeds, not of words. When deeds are good, a brief report of them is enough; when they are wrong, speeches dressed up in fine phrases become a screen for them. But if leaders, as you are now, reduce the matter to its essentials and give your verdicts on all the accused together, people will be less inclined to look for fine words to cover unjust deeds.”

They put to death not fewer than two hundred of the Plataeans themselves, and twenty-five Athenians who had been besieged with them; the women they enslaved. As for the city, [the Thebans] gave it for about a year to some Megarians who had been driven out in civil strife, and to those surviving Plataeans who were on their side, to live in. Later they razed it completely to the ground, from its foundations, and built near the Heraeum a hostel two hundred feet square, with rooms all around it on the ground floor and the upper floor, using the roofs and doors of the Plataeans. From the rest of the furnishings that were inside the walls, the bronze and iron, they made couches and dedicated them to Hera; and they built her a stone temple a hundred feet long.note

The land they confiscated as public property and leased out for ten years, and the Thebans farmed it. Almost entirely, in fact, it was for the Thebans’ sake that the Spartans had turned so harshly against the Plataeans, believing that the Thebans would be useful to them in the war, which was then just beginning. So ended the affairs of Plataea, in the ninety-third year after the Plataeans became allies of the Athenians.note

Now Peithias was a volunteer proxenos of the Athenians and leader of the people, and so these men brought him to trial, alleging that he was enslaving Corcyra to the Athenians. He was acquitted, and in turn he prosecuted the five richest of them, charging that they had been cutting vine-props from the sacred precinct of Zeus and of Alcinous; the penalty laid down was a stater for each prop. They were convicted, and because the fine was so large they sat as suppliants at the temples, asking to pay it in installments. But Peithias, who happened also to be a member of the council, persuaded it to enforce the law.note

Since the law barred them, and at the same time they learned that Peithias intended, while he was still on the council, to persuade the people to have the same friends and enemies as the Athenians, they banded together, took daggers, burst suddenly into the council chamber, and killed Peithias and about sixty others, councilors and private citizens alike. A few of those who shared Peithias’ views took refuge on the Athenian trireme, which was still there.

Having done this, they called the Corcyraeans together and told them that this was for the best and was the surest way to avoid being enslaved by the Athenians. For the future, they said, the Corcyraeans should receive neither side unless they came peaceably with a single ship, and should treat any larger force as hostile. Having said this, they compelled the people to ratify the proposal. They also sent envoys to Athens at once, to explain that what had been done was expedient, and to persuade those who had fled there not to take any hostile action, so that there would be no backlash.

When the envoys arrived, the Athenians arrested them as revolutionaries, together with all those they had won over, and placed them in custody on Aegina.

The next day there was some skirmishing at long range, and both sides sent round to the countryside, calling on the slaves to join them and promising them freedom. Most of the household slaves joined the people as allies, while the other side got eight hundred mercenaries from the mainland.

After a day’s interval there was another battle, and the people won, having the advantage both in the strength of their positions and in numbers. The women, too, boldly joined in the fight, pelting the enemy with tiles from the houses and standing up to the uproar with a steadiness beyond their nature. The rout came toward late afternoon, and the few were afraid that the people would come on and seize the dockyard at the first rush and kill them. So they set fire to the houses around the marketplace and the apartment blocks, so that there would be no way of approach. They spared neither their own property nor anyone else’s, with the result that a great deal of merchants’ goods was burned, and the whole city would have been in danger of destruction if a wind had sprung up to carry the flames toward it.

On the following day Nicostratus son of Diitrephes, an Athenian general, arrived from Naupactus to help, with twelve ships and five hundred Messenian hoplites. He set about arranging a settlement and persuaded the two sides to agree on these terms. Ten men, those most to blame, were to be put on trial; they did not stay to face it. The rest were to go on living in the city, after making a treaty with one another and with the Athenians to have the same enemies and the same friends. Having arranged this, he was about to sail away. But the leaders of the people persuaded him to leave them five of his own ships, so that their opponents would be less inclined to make trouble. They themselves would man an equal number from their own people and send them with him. He agreed, and they began enlisting their enemies for the ships.note

These men were afraid of being sent off to Athens, so they sat down as suppliants in the temple of the Dioscuri. Nicostratus tried to get them to stand up and to reassure them. When he could not persuade them, the people armed themselves. Their pretext was that the suppliants’ refusal to sail, and the distrust it showed, proved that they intended nothing good. The people took the suppliants’ weapons from their houses, and they would have killed some of those they came across if Nicostratus had not stopped them. Seeing what was happening, the rest sat down as suppliants in the Heraeum, no fewer than four hundred of them. The people feared they might start a revolt. So they persuaded them to get up, ferried them across to the island in front of the Heraeum, and had their provisions sent over to them there.note

The Corcyraeans were in great confusion and alarmed both by the situation in the city and by the approaching fleet. They set about fitting out sixty ships at once, and sent each one out against the enemy as soon as it was manned. The Athenians, however, urged them to let the Athenians sail out first and to follow afterward with all their ships together. As it was, their ships reached the enemy in scattered groups. Two deserted at once, and on others the crews were fighting among themselves; there was no order in anything they did. Seeing the confusion, the Peloponnesians deployed twenty ships against the Corcyraeans and the rest against the twelve Athenian ships, two of which were the Salaminia and the Paralus.

The Corcyraeans attacked badly and a few ships at a time, and on their side of the battle they were in trouble. The Athenians feared the enemy’s numbers and being surrounded. So they did not attack the ships ranged against them in a body or in the center, but charged at one wing and sank a single ship. When the enemy then formed into a circle, the Athenians sailed round them and tried to throw them into confusion. The Peloponnesians facing the Corcyraeans saw this. Fearing a repeat of what had happened at Naupactus, they came to help, and the united fleet advanced on the Athenians together. The Athenians now began to give way, backing water. At the same time they wanted the Corcyraean ships to escape first, as far as possible, while they themselves retreated slowly with the enemy ranged against them.note

The Corcyraeans were afraid that the enemy, as victors, would sail against the city and either take off the men on the island or start some other upheaval. So they ferried the men from the island back to the Heraeum and kept the city under guard. But the enemy, though they had won the sea battle, did not dare to sail against the city. Instead they sailed back to the mainland, to the place they had put out from, with thirteen Corcyraean ships they had captured. The next day they still did not sail against the city, although the Corcyraeans were in great confusion and fear, and although Brasidas, it is said, urged Alcidas to attack; but he did not have an equal vote. Instead they landed at the promontory of Leucimme and ravaged the countryside.

Meanwhile the Corcyraean people were terrified that the ships would sail against them. They entered into talks with the suppliants and the others about how the city could be saved, and persuaded some of them to go aboard the ships; for in spite of everything they had manned thirty, expecting the attack. The Peloponnesians ravaged the land until midday and then sailed away. At nightfall, fire signals warned them that sixty Athenian ships were approaching from Leucas. The Athenians had sent these, with Eurymedon son of Thucles as general, when they learned of the civil strife and that the ships with Alcidas were about to sail against Corcyra.

So that same night the Peloponnesians set off at once for home with all speed, keeping close to the coast. They hauled their ships across the isthmus of Leucas so as not to be seen sailing round it, and got away. When the Corcyraeans saw that the Athenian ships were approaching and the enemy’s ships had gone, they brought the Messenians, who had previously been outside the walls, into the city. They ordered the ships they had manned to sail round to the Hyllaic harbor, and while these were on their way round, they killed any of their enemies they could catch. They also made all those they had persuaded to go aboard disembark from the ships, and did away with them. Then they went to the Heraeum, persuaded about fifty of the suppliants to stand trial, and condemned them all to death.note

Most of the suppliants, those who had not been persuaded, saw what was happening and killed one another right there in the sanctuary. Some hanged themselves from the trees, and the rest made away with themselves, each as best he could. Eurymedon stayed seven days after arriving with his sixty ships, and for those seven days the Corcyraeans went on slaughtering those of their own people they regarded as their enemies. The charge they brought was that their victims were trying to overthrow the democracy. But some were killed because of private enmity, and others by their debtors because of money owed to them. Death took every form. As tends to happen at such times, there was nothing that did not happen, and worse besides. A father killed his son; men were dragged from the altars and killed beside them; and some were even walled up in the temple of Dionysus and died there.

So savage was the course the civil strife took. It seemed all the more savage because it was one of the first; for later practically the whole Greek world was convulsed. Everywhere there were quarrels, with the leaders of the democracies trying to bring in the Athenians and the few trying to bring in the Spartans. In peacetime they would have had no pretext for calling them in, nor would they have been ready to. But now the two powers were at war, and either party could count on an alliance that would damage its opponents and, by the same means, strengthen itself. So those who wanted revolution easily found ways to bring in outsiders.

Civil strife brought many terrible things upon the cities. Such things happen and always will, as long as human nature remains the same, though they are more violent or milder, and different in form, according to each change of circumstance. In peace and prosperity, cities and individuals alike have better judgment, because they are not forced into necessities they did not choose. But war takes away the easy supply of daily needs; it is a violent teacher, and it brings most people’s tempers down to the level of their circumstances.

A man who plotted and succeeded was clever, and one who detected a plot was cleverer still. But a man who planned ahead so as to need neither was a wrecker of his party and terrified of his opponents. In short, people praised the man who struck first at someone about to do harm, and the man who incited to wrongdoing someone who had never thought of it. Indeed, ties of kinship became weaker than ties of party, because party members were readier to dare anything without excuses. For such associations were formed not for mutual help under the established laws, but for self-aggrandizement in defiance of them. And they confirmed their pledges to one another less by divine law than by having broken the law together. When their opponents made fair proposals, they accepted them, if they had the upper hand, to guard against their opponents’ actions, not out of generosity.

Getting revenge on someone mattered more than not being wronged in the first place. If oaths of reconciliation were ever sworn, each side gave them to meet an immediate impasse, and they held only while neither had strength from any other source. But when the chance came, whoever was first to take courage, if he saw his enemy off guard, took more pleasure in a revenge that exploited trust than in one taken openly. He counted its safety, and also that by winning through deceit he gained a prize for cleverness as well. Most people would sooner be called clever when they are villains than good when they are simple, and they are ashamed of the second and take pride in the first. The cause of all this was power pursued out of greed and ambition; and from these came the fierce zeal of men once they were locked in rivalry.

For the leaders in the cities, on each side, used fine-sounding slogans: political equality for the people on one side, moderate aristocracy on the other. In word they served the common interest, but in fact they made it their prize. Struggling by every means to get the better of one another, they dared the most terrible deeds and carried out reprisals that were greater still. They did not limit these to what was just and good for the city, but measured them by whatever pleased their own side at the moment. Whether by an unjust vote of condemnation or by seizing power with their own hands, they were ready to satisfy the rivalry of the moment. So neither side practiced piety; but those who managed to bring off some odious deed under cover of fine words had the better reputation. The citizens in between were destroyed by both sides, either because they would not join the struggle or out of resentment that they should survive.

Thus every form of wickedness took hold in the Greek world because of civil strife. Simplicity, which is so large a part of nobility, was laughed to scorn and vanished. Distrust ranged men against one another in their minds and prevailed far and wide. For there was nothing to reconcile them, no word that could be relied on, no oath that inspired fear. All of them, when they had the upper hand, calculated that nothing could be counted on as secure, so they took precautions against being harmed rather than being able to trust anyone. And on the whole it was the less intelligent who came out on top. They feared their own shortcomings and their opponents’ intelligence. They were afraid of being beaten in argument and of being plotted against first by their opponents’ versatile minds, so they went boldly into action. Their opponents, in contempt, assumed they would see trouble coming and need not take by action what they could secure by intelligence; so they were caught off guard and destroyed in greater numbers.

Life in the city was thrown into confusion at this crisis. Human nature, which is used to doing wrong even in defiance of the laws, now gained mastery over the laws. It gladly showed itself unable to govern its anger, stronger than justice, and hostile to all superiority. For men would not have put revenge above piety, and gain above not doing wrong, had envy not had its power to do harm. When they take revenge on others, men think fit to abolish in advance the common laws on such matters. These are the laws that give everyone the hope of being saved themselves if they come to grief. Men do not leave them in place in case someone in danger should one day need one of them.]

Such were the first outbursts of rage that the Corcyraeans in the city turned on one another, and Eurymedon and the Athenians sailed away with their ships. Later the Corcyraean exiles, about five hundred of whom had got away safely, seized forts on the mainland and took control of the territory across the water that belonged to Corcyra. Using it as their base, they plundered the people on the island and did a great deal of damage, and a severe famine broke out in the city. They also sent envoys to Sparta and Corinth about their return. When nothing came of this, they later got together boats and mercenaries and crossed over to the island, about six hundred in all. They burned their boats so that there would be no hope of anything except mastering the land. Then they went up onto Mount Istone, built a fort there, and harassed those in the city and controlled the countryside.

So the Leontinians’ allies sent to Athens. Appealing to an old alliance and to their being Ionians, they persuaded the Athenians to send them ships, for the Syracusans were shutting them off from both land and sea. The Athenians sent the ships. Their pretext was kinship, but their real aims were to stop grain being shipped from Sicily to the Peloponnese and to make a preliminary trial of whether they could bring affairs in Sicily under their control. So they established themselves at Rhegium in Italy and carried on the war together with their allies. And the summer ended.

A similar flood occurred at Atalante, the island off Opuntian Locris. It carried away part of the Athenian fort, and of two ships that had been hauled up on shore it smashed one. At Peparethus too the sea drew back somewhat, though it did not flood the land. An earthquake threw down part of the wall, the prytaneum and a few other houses. In my own opinion, the cause of this sort of thing is that wherever the earthquake was strongest, the sea is driven back at that point, and then, suddenly drawn back in again, it makes the flood more violent. I do not think such a thing could happen without an earthquake.note

Two tribal contingents of the Messanians happened to be garrisoning Mylae, and they had also laid an ambush for the men from the ships. But the Athenians and their allies routed the men in the ambush and killed many of them. Then they attacked the fortification and forced the garrison to agree to terms: to surrender the acropolis and to join them in a campaign against Messana. After this, when the Athenians and their allies advanced, the Messanians themselves came over as well, giving hostages and providing the other guarantees.

At a signal, the Athenians from the city came out in full force by land to meet them at the same spot, under the command of Hipponicus son of Callias and Eurymedon son of Thucles. They encamped that day at Tanagra, ravaged the land and spent the night there. The next day they defeated in battle the Tanagraeans who came out against them, along with some Thebans who had come to their aid. They took the arms of the fallen, set up a trophy and withdrew, some to the city, the others to the ships. Nicias sailed along the coast with the sixty ships, ravaged the coastal districts of Locris and went back home.

At the same time the city seemed to them well placed for the war against the Athenians. A fleet could be made ready there against Euboea, so that the crossing would be short, and it would be useful for the route to Thrace. All in all, they were eager to found the place. First, then, they consulted the god at Delphi, and when he told them to proceed, they sent out settlers drawn from themselves and from the perioeci, and invited any of the other Greeks who wished to join them, except Ionians, Achaeans and certain other peoples. Three Spartans led the colony as its founders: Leon, Alcidas and Damagon. Once established, they built new walls for the city, which is now called Heraclea and lies about forty stades from Thermopylae and twenty from the sea. They also set about building dockyards, and they walled off the side toward Thermopylae at the pass itself, so that it would be easy for them to defend.

When this city was first being settled, the Athenians were alarmed and thought it was being established chiefly against Euboea, since the crossing to Cenaeum in Euboea is short. Afterward, however, things turned out contrary to their expectation, for nothing dangerous came of it. The reason was this. The Thessalians, who were the dominant power in that region, and the people on whose land it was being founded were afraid of having such powerful neighbors. So they kept harming the newly established settlers and waging war on them without pause, until they had worn them down, even though there had been very many of them at first (for everyone joined confidently, since it was the Spartans who were founding the city and they believed it would be secure). Not least, though, the Spartans’ own governors who came out there ruined its affairs and reduced it to a small population. They frightened away most of the settlers by governing harshly and in some matters unjustly, so that its neighbors now overpowered it more easily.

At this point Demosthenes was persuaded by the Messenians that, with so large an army assembled, it would be a fine thing for him to attack the Aetolians. They were enemies of Naupactus, and if he defeated them, he would easily win over to the Athenians the rest of the mainland in that region as well. The Aetolian people, they explained, was large and warlike, but since it lived in unwalled villages, and these widely scattered, and used only light equipment, it would not be hard to subdue before its men could gather to defend themselves. They urged him to attack the Apodotians first, then the Ophioneans and after them the Eurytanians. These are the largest part of the Aetolians; they speak a language very hard to understand and, it is said, eat raw flesh. Once these were taken, they said, the rest would easily come over.

Demosthenes was persuaded, partly to oblige the Messenians, but above all because he thought that, without Athenian forces, using his mainland allies together with the Aetolians, he could go by land against the Boeotians. His route would run through the territory of the Ozolian Locrians to Cytinium in Doris, keeping Parnassus on his right, until he came down into Phocis. The Phocians seemed likely to join the campaign eagerly, given their long-standing friendship with Athens, or else could be brought over by force (and Phocis already borders on Boeotia). So he set out with his whole army from Leucas, against the wishes of the Acarnanians, and sailed along the coast to Sollium.

He told the Acarnanians his plan, but they would not accept it because of his failure to wall off Leucas. So with the rest of the army—Cephallenians, Messenians, Zacynthians and three hundred Athenian marines from his own ships (for the fifteen Corcyraean ships had gone away)—he marched against the Aetolians. He set out from Oeneon in Locris. These Ozolian Locrians were allies, and they were supposed to meet the Athenians in the interior with their whole force. Since they bordered on the Aetolians and were armed in the same way, it was thought they would be of great help on the campaign, because of their experience of the Aetolians’ way of fighting and of the terrain.

He camped for the night with his army in the sanctuary of Nemean Zeus, where the poet Hesiod is said to have been killed by the local people, after an oracle had told him he would suffer this fate at Nemea. At dawn he set off and marched into Aetolia. On the first day he took Potidania, on the second Crocyleium and on the third Teichium. There he halted and sent the plunder back to Eupalium in Locris. His plan was to subdue the rest first, and then, if the Ophioneans were unwilling to come to terms, to return to Naupactus and campaign against them later.note

The Messenians gave Demosthenes much the same advice as they had at first, when they were assuring him that the conquest of the Aetolians would be easy. They urged him to advance as quickly as possible against the villages and not to wait until the Aetolians had all gathered and drawn up against him, but always to try to take whatever village lay in his path. Persuaded by them, and putting his hopes in his good fortune since nothing had stood in his way, he did not wait for the Locrians who were supposed to come to his support (light-armed javelin men were what he lacked most). Instead he advanced on Aegitium and took it by storm at the first assault.

For the inhabitants had slipped away and were sitting on the hills above the town, which stood on high ground about eighty stades from the sea. The Aetolians, who by now had come to the relief of Aegitium, attacked the Athenians and their allies, running down from the hills from every direction and hurling javelins. Whenever the Athenian army advanced, they gave way, and when it withdrew, they pressed it hard. For a long time the fighting went on like this, with pursuits and retreats, and in both the Athenians had the worst of it.

So long as the archers had arrows and were able to use them, the Athenians held out, since the Aetolians, being lightly armed, were kept back when they were shot at. But when the archers’ commander was killed and his men scattered, the soldiers themselves were exhausted, having been worn down for a long time by the same toil, and the Aetolians kept pressing them and hurling javelins. At that point they finally turned and fled. They fell into ravines with no way out and into country they did not know, and were cut down; for their guide on the roads, Chromon the Messenian, had happened to be killed.

The Aetolians, quick on their feet and lightly armed, kept hurling javelins, caught many of the fugitives on the spot during the rout and killed them. Most of the rest lost their way and were swept into the woods, from which there were no paths out; the Aetolians brought fire and burned the woods all around them. Every form of flight and destruction befell the Athenian army, and the survivors barely escaped to the sea and to Oeneon in Locris, the very place from which they had set out.

Many of the allies were killed, and of the Athenians themselves about a hundred and twenty hoplites. These men, so many in number and all of the same age, were the very best men lost from the city of Athens in this war. The other general, Procles, was killed as well. They recovered their dead from the Aetolians under a truce, withdrew to Naupactus and later went back to Athens on the ships. Demosthenes stayed behind around Naupactus and in that region, because he feared the Athenians after what had happened.

When the army had assembled at Delphi, Eurylochus sent a herald to the Ozolian Locrians, since the road to Naupactus ran through their territory, and he also wanted to detach them from the Athenians. Of the Locrians, it was the Amphissians above all who worked with him, being afraid because of their hostility with the Phocians. They were the first to give hostages themselves, and they persuaded the others to give them as well, since these feared the approaching army: first their neighbors the Myoneans (for at this point Locris is hardest to invade), then the Ipneans, Messapians, Tritaeans, Chalaeans, Tolophonians, Hessians and Oeanthians. All of these also joined the campaign. The Olpaeans gave hostages but did not follow, and the Hyaeans did not give hostages until their village called Polis had been taken.

When everything was ready and he had deposited the hostages at Cytinium in Doris, Eurylochus advanced with the army on Naupactus through Locrian territory. On the way he took two of their towns, Oeneon and Eupalium, because they would not come over. Once they were in the territory of Naupactus, with the Aetolians now joining them as well, they ravaged the land and took the suburb, which was unwalled. Then they went against Molycreium, a Corinthian colony but subject to the Athenians, and took it. Demosthenes the Athenian (he happened still to be around Naupactus after the affair in Aetolia) learned of the army in advance and, fearing for the city, went and persuaded the Acarnanians to come to the aid of Naupactus. It was difficult, because of his withdrawal from Leucas.

They sent a thousand hoplites with him on the ships, and these got in and saved the place; for there was a danger that, with the wall so long and the defenders so few, they would not hold out. When Eurylochus and those with him realized that the force had got in and that it was impossible to take the city by storm, they withdrew, not to the Peloponnese but to Aeolis, the region now called Calydon and Pleuron, to the places in that area, and to Proschium in Aetolia.

For the Ambraciots had come to them and persuaded them to join in attacking Amphilochian Argos and the rest of Amphilochia, and Acarnania as well. They said that if they conquered these, the whole mainland would be in alliance with Sparta. Eurylochus was persuaded, dismissed the Aetolians and waited with his army in that area until the Ambraciots should take the field against Argos and he would need to support them. And the summer ended.note

And it was then, after the purification, that the Athenians first held the four-yearly festival of the Delia. In fact, even in ancient times there had once been a great gathering at Delos of the Ionians and the neighboring islanders. They came to the festival with their wives and children, as the Ionians now go to the Ephesia, and a contest was held there, both athletic and musical, and the cities brought choruses. Homer shows most clearly that this was so in the following verses, which come from a hymn to Apollo: “But it is in Delos, Phoebus, that your heart delights most of all, where the Ionians in their trailing robes gather with their children and wives in your streets. There they remember you and delight you with boxing and dancing and song, whenever they hold the contest.”note

That there was also a musical contest, and that people traveled there to compete in it, he shows again in the following lines, which come from the same hymn. After singing the praises of the Delian chorus of women, he ended his tribute with these verses, in which he also mentioned himself: “But come now, may Apollo be gracious, and Artemis with him; and farewell to all of you. Remember me in time to come, whenever some other man on earth, a much-suffering stranger, comes here and asks: ‘Girls, who is the sweetest of the singers who visit here, and in whom do you take the most delight?’

Then all of you answer him well, and speak of me: ‘A blind man; he lives in rocky Chios.’” That is the evidence Homer gave that even in ancient times there was a great gathering and festival on Delos. Later the islanders and the Athenians went on sending choruses with offerings, but the contests and most of the rest were discontinued, presumably because of misfortunes, until the Athenians on this occasion held the contest, and horse races as well, which had not been held before.

They also sent for Demosthenes, the Athenian who had commanded the expedition to Aetolia, to be their leader, and for the twenty Athenian ships that happened to be around the Peloponnese, under the command of Aristoteles son of Timocrates and Hierophon son of Antimnestus. The Ambraciots at Olpae, for their part, sent a messenger to their city urging the people to come to their help in full force. They were afraid that Eurylochus’ men would not be able to get past the Acarnanians, and that they themselves would either have to fight on their own or find it unsafe to retreat if they wanted to.

Having united their forces, at daybreak they took up position at the place called Metropolis and made camp. Not much later the Athenians arrived in the Ambracian Gulf with their twenty ships to help the Argives, and so did Demosthenes with two hundred Messenian hoplites and sixty Athenian archers. The ships lay at anchor off the hill at Olpae, on the seaward side. The Acarnanians and a few of the Amphilochians (most of them were held back by force by the Ambraciots), who had by now gathered at Argos, were preparing to fight the enemy, and they chose Demosthenes, together with their own generals, as leader of the whole allied force. He led them up near Olpae and encamped; a large ravine separated the two armies. For five days they stayed quiet, and on the sixth both sides drew up for battle.

The Peloponnesian army was larger and overlapped his line, so Demosthenes, afraid of being encircled, set an ambush of hoplites and light troops, some four hundred in all, in a sunken road overgrown with brush. At the very moment of the clash they were to spring up where the enemy’s line overlapped and fall on them from the rear. When both sides were ready, they closed. Demosthenes held the right wing with the Messenians and a few Athenians; the rest of the line was held by the Acarnanians, drawn up by their separate contingents, and by the Amphilochian javelin-men who were present. The Peloponnesians and Ambraciots were drawn up mixed together, except for the Mantineans. These stood in a body rather toward the left, though not at the very end of the wing; the extreme left was held by Eurylochus and his men, opposite the Messenians and Demosthenes.

When they were already engaged and the Peloponnesians were overlapping with their wing and encircling their opponents’ right, the Acarnanians from the ambush came up behind them, fell on them from the rear and routed them. They did not stand to resist, and in their panic they carried the greater part of the army into flight with them; for when they saw the division under Eurylochus, the strongest part of their army, being destroyed, they were far more frightened. And the Messenians, who were stationed there with Demosthenes, did most of the work.

The Ambraciots and those on the right wing, meanwhile, defeated the troops opposite them and pursued them toward Argos; for they happen to be the most warlike people in that region. But as they came back and saw that most of their army had been beaten, and the rest of the Acarnanians pressed them hard, they barely made it to safety at Olpae, and many of them were killed as they dashed in without order or discipline—except for the Mantineans, who of the whole army kept their formation best in the retreat. The battle ended late in the evening.

They gave back the dead, set up a trophy themselves, and took up their own dead, about three hundred of whom had been killed. Openly they would not grant all of them a truce to withdraw; but in secret Demosthenes and his fellow generals of the Acarnanians agreed with the Mantineans, Menedaïus and the other Peloponnesian commanders, and those of them who were of most consequence, that they could leave quickly. His aim was to strip the Ambraciots and the crowd of [foreign] mercenaries of their support, and above all he wanted to discredit the Spartans and Peloponnesians among the Greeks of that region as men who had betrayed their allies and put their own interest first. So they took up their dead and buried them hastily, as best they could, and those who had been granted permission began planning their secret withdrawal.

Word now reached Demosthenes and the Acarnanians that the Ambraciots from the city, in response to the first message from Olpae, were coming in full force through the territory of the Amphilochians to help, wanting to join their men at Olpae and knowing nothing of what had happened. He at once sent part of his army to lay ambushes along the roads and occupy the strong points in advance, and at the same time made ready to march against them with the rest of his forces.

Meanwhile the Mantineans and the others who had the agreement went out on the pretext of gathering vegetables and firewood and slipped away in small groups, collecting as they went the things they had supposedly come out for. But once they had got some way from Olpae, they moved off faster. The Ambraciots and the others, as many as happened to have come out with them in this way in a body, when they realized that they were leaving, set off too and ran after them at full speed, wanting to catch up with them.note

At first the Acarnanians thought that all of them alike were leaving without a truce, and they set off in pursuit of the Peloponnesians too; and when some of their generals tried to stop them, saying there was a truce with these men, one soldier threw a javelin at them, thinking that they were being betrayed. Afterward, though, they let the Mantineans and the Peloponnesians go and killed the Ambraciots. There was much dispute and confusion over whether a given man was an Ambraciot or a Peloponnesian. They killed some two hundred of them; the rest escaped to Agraïs, which borders on that area, and Salynthius, the king of the Agraeans, who was friendly to them, took them in.

At dawn he fell on the Ambraciots while they were still in their beds. They had no inkling of what had happened and took the attackers for their own men instead. Demosthenes had deliberately put the Messenians in front and told them to call out to the enemy; they spoke the Doric dialect and so reassured the sentries, and at the same time they could not be made out by sight, since it was still night. So when he fell on their army, they routed it, killing most of them on the spot, while the rest took to flight through the mountains. But the roads had already been occupied. The Amphilochians, moreover, knew their own country and were light-armed against hoplites, while the Ambraciots did not know it and had no idea which way to turn; so they fell into ravines and into the ambushes laid in advance, and were destroyed.

Trying every kind of escape, some even made for the sea, which was not far off. When they saw the Athenian ships sailing along the coast just as the action was taking place, they swam out to them, thinking in the panic of the moment that it was better to be killed, if they must be, by the men in the ships than by the Amphilochians, who were non-Greeks and their bitterest enemies. So the Ambraciots, after such a disaster, came safely home to their city, few out of many. The Acarnanians stripped the dead, set up trophies, and returned to Argos.

The next day a herald came to them from the Ambraciots who had fled from Olpae to the Agraeans. He came to ask for the return of the dead who had been killed after the first battle, when they had gone out together with the Mantineans and the others covered by the truce, without being covered themselves. When the herald saw the arms of the Ambraciots from the city, he was astonished at their number, for he did not know of the disaster but thought they belonged to his own group. Someone asked him why he was astonished and how many of their men had died, the questioner in turn thinking that the herald came from the men at Idomene. He said about two hundred.

The questioner broke in: “Well, these arms don’t look like that—there are more than a thousand here.” The herald replied, “Then they don’t belong to the men who were fighting with us.” The other answered, “They do, if you were the ones fighting at Idomene yesterday.” “But we didn’t fight anyone yesterday; it was the day before, during the retreat.” “Well, we certainly fought these men yesterday—the ones who came to help from the city of the Ambraciots.” When the herald heard this and realized that the relief force from the city had been destroyed, he cried out in grief and, stunned by the scale of the disaster before him, went straight off without accomplishing his errand, no longer asking for the dead.

This was in fact the greatest disaster to befall a single Greek city within so few days in the whole of this war. I have not recorded the number of the dead, because the number said to have perished is incredible in proportion to the size of the city. I do know, however, that if the Acarnanians and Amphilochians had been willing to follow the Athenians and Demosthenes and take Ambracia, they would have taken it at the first assault. As it was, they were afraid that if the Athenians held it, they would be more troublesome neighbors to them.

For the future the Acarnanians and Amphilochians made a treaty and alliance with the Ambraciots for a hundred years, on these terms: the Ambraciots were not to join the Acarnanians in a campaign against the Peloponnesians, nor the Acarnanians to join the Ambraciots against the Athenians; each was to help defend the other’s territory; the Ambraciots were to give back whatever places or hostages of the Amphilochians they held; and they were not to help Anactorium, which was hostile to the Acarnanians. Having made this agreement, they ended the war. After this the Corinthians sent a garrison of their own to Ambracia, some three hundred hoplites under the command of Xenocleidas son of Euthycles; they made their way through the mainland with difficulty and arrived. Such were the events at Ambracia.

The Athenians began manning forty ships to send them, partly because they thought the war there would be ended sooner, partly because they wanted to give their navy practice. So they sent out one of the generals, Pythodorus, with a few ships, and they intended to send Sophocles son of Sostratides and Eurymedon son of Thucles with the larger part of the fleet. Pythodorus, who now held Laches’ command of the ships, sailed at the end of the winter against the Locrian fort that Laches had taken earlier, was defeated in battle by the Locrians, and withdrew.note

At the same time the Locrians had also invaded Rhegian territory in full force, so that the Rhegians would not go to the help of the Messanians. Another reason was that Rhegian exiles who were with them were urging them on. Rhegium had long been torn by civil strife, and at that moment it could not defend itself against the Locrians, which was all the more reason for them to attack. After ravaging the land the Locrians withdrew their infantry, while the ships stayed to guard Messana. Other ships that were being manned were to anchor there and carry on the war from that base.

for Pylos is about four hundred stades from Sparta and lies in what was once Messenian land; the Spartans call it Coryphasium. The others said that there were plenty of deserted headlands in the Peloponnese if he wanted to occupy them and run up costs for the city. But to him this place seemed to stand out from any other. There was a harbor next to it. The Messenians had been at home there in the old days and spoke the same dialect as the Spartans, so with it as their base they could do the Spartans the greatest damage, and they would also be reliable guards of the place.note

He failed to persuade either the generals or the soldiers, and afterward also shared his plan with the taxiarchs without success. So he stayed idle, since the weather kept them from sailing, until the soldiers themselves, having nothing to do, were seized by an impulse to stand around and fortify the place. They set to work. They had no iron tools for working stone, so they brought stones as they picked them out and fitted them together however each one happened to fit. Wherever they needed mortar, they carried it on their backs for lack of hods, bending forward so that it would stay on as well as possible and clasping their hands behind them so that it would not slide off. They hurried in every way to finish the most vulnerable points before the Spartans could arrive to stop them. Most of the place was strong by nature and needed no wall at all.note

The Spartans happened to be celebrating a festival. Besides, when they heard the news they made light of it, thinking that whenever they marched out they would find either that the Athenians would not stand their ground or that they could easily take the place by force. Their army was also still at Athens, and that held them back somewhat. In six days the Athenians fortified the landward side of the place and the points where a wall was most needed. Then they left Demosthenes there with five ships to guard it and hurried on with most of the fleet on their voyage to Corcyra and Sicily.

While the Peloponnesians were still sailing up, Demosthenes managed in time to send off two ships secretly. They were to tell Eurymedon and the Athenians with the fleet at Zacynthus to come, because the place was in danger. The ships sailed in haste as Demosthenes had instructed. Meanwhile the Spartans prepared to assault the fort by land and by sea, expecting to capture with ease a structure built in a hurry and held by only a few men. But they also expected the Athenian ships to come from Zacynthus to its relief. So they intended, if they did not take it first, to block the entrances of the harbor as well, so that the Athenians could not anchor in it.

The island called Sphacteria stretches along the harbor and lies close in front of it, and so it makes the harbor secure and its entrances narrow. On one side, by the Athenian fort and Pylos, there is a channel for two ships, and on the other, toward the rest of the mainland, a channel for eight or nine. The island was entirely wooded and, being uninhabited, had no paths. It was about fifteen stades in length. The Spartans meant to close the entrances with ships packed close together, prows facing outward. They also feared that the enemy might use the island as a base to make war on them, so they ferried hoplites across to it and posted others along the mainland.note

In this way, they reckoned, both the island and the mainland would be hostile to the Athenians. The mainland offered no place to land, because the coast of Pylos itself outside the entrance, facing the open sea, had no harbors, and the Athenians would have no base from which to help their own men. The Spartans themselves, meanwhile, would in all likelihood take the place by siege without a sea battle or any risk, since there was no grain in it and it had been occupied with scanty preparations. Once they had decided this, they began ferrying the hoplites across to the island, choosing them by lot from all the companies. Others had crossed before in relays, but the last group, who were trapped there, numbered four hundred and twenty, together with the helots who attended them. Their commander was Epitadas son of Molobrus.note

He posted most of his men, armed and unarmed alike, at the best fortified and strongest parts of the place, facing the mainland, with orders to repel the infantry if it attacked. He himself picked out sixty hoplites and a few archers from the whole force and went outside the wall toward the sea, where he most expected the enemy to try to land. The ground there was difficult and rocky and faced the open sea, but the wall was weakest at that point, and he thought they would be eager to force their way in there. The Athenians had never expected to be beaten at sea, so they had not built a strong wall there, and if the enemy forced a landing the place could be taken. So at this point he went down to the very edge of the sea and posted his hoplites to keep the enemy off if he could, and he exhorted them as follows:

I count the difficulty of landing here as ours. It becomes our ally if we stand firm. But if we give way, then however difficult the ground is, it will be easy going for them with no one to stop them. We shall also find the enemy more dangerous, since it will not be easy for him to retreat again, even if we press him hard. While they are on their ships they are easiest to fight off, but once they have landed they are on equal terms with us. Nor need we be too afraid of their numbers. Large as their force is, it will fight only a little at a time, because there is no room to bring the ships in to shore. And this is not an army on land, greater than ours on equal terms, but an army fighting from ships, and ships need many things to go right at sea.

So I consider their difficulties a match for our numbers. You are Athenians, and you know from experience of landing from ships on other people’s shores that if a man stands his ground and does not give way out of fear of the surf and of the terrifying approach of the ships, the landing can never be forced. So I also ask you now to stand firm yourselves, to fight them off right here at the water’s edge, and to save both ourselves and the place.”

Of them all, Brasidas stood out most. He was in command of a trireme, and he saw that because the ground was difficult the trierarchs and helmsmen were holding back even where it seemed possible to put in, careful not to smash their ships. He shouted at them that it made no sense to spare timber and let the enemy build a fort in their country. He ordered them to wreck their own ships if that was what it took to force a landing. He urged the allies not to shrink, at this moment, from giving up their ships to the Spartans in return for the great benefits they had received, but to run them aground, get ashore however they could, and master both the men and the place.note

So he urged the others on in this way. Then he forced his own helmsman to run the ship aground and made for the gangway. As he tried to land he was beaten back by the Athenians, and after receiving many wounds he fainted. As he fell into the outrigger his shield slipped off into the sea. It was washed ashore, and the Athenians picked it up and later used it for the trophy they set up for this attack.

The rest were eager, but they could not land, both because the ground was difficult and because the Athenians stood firm and gave no ground at all. Fortune had turned things round to the point that the Athenians were fighting off an attack from the sea while standing on land, and Laconian land at that, while the Spartans were trying to land from ships on their own country, now hostile to them, against Athenians. For at that time it made up a large part of the reputation of the Spartans that they were above all a land people and supreme in infantry, and of the Athenians that they were a seafaring people and far superior in ships.

They saw that the mainland and the island were both crowded with hoplites, and that the ships in the harbor were making no move to sail out. Since they could not tell where to anchor, they sailed for the time being to the island of Prote, which is not far off and is uninhabited, and camped there. The next day they put out prepared for a sea battle. If the enemy was willing to come out against them into open water, they would fight there; if not, they meant to sail in on them themselves. The Spartans neither put out to meet them nor, as it turned out, had they done what they had planned and blocked the entrances. Instead they stayed quietly on land, manning their ships and preparing to fight a sea battle in the harbor, which was not small, if anyone sailed in.

When the Athenians realized this, they rushed in against them through both entrances. They fell on most of the ships, which were already afloat and facing them, and put them to flight. They pursued them as far as the short distance allowed, disabled many and captured five, one of them with its crew aboard. Then they rammed the rest, which had fled to the shore for refuge. Some ships were struck while still being manned, before they could put out, and some, whose crews had fled, the Athenians fastened to their own ships and towed away empty. The Spartans saw this and were deeply distressed at the disaster, because their men were being cut off on the island. They rushed to help, waded into the sea in their armor, took hold of the ships, and pulled them back. In all this, each man felt that the action was being held up wherever he was not taking part himself.

The confusion was great, and around the ships each side’s usual way of fighting was reversed. The Spartans, in their eagerness and dismay, were simply fighting a sea battle from the land, so to speak. The Athenians had the upper hand and wanted to push their present good fortune as far as it would go, so they were fighting a land battle from ships. After giving each other a great deal of trouble and inflicting wounds, they separated, and the Spartans saved their empty ships, except those captured at first. Each side returned to its camp. The Athenians set up a trophy, gave back the dead, and took possession of the wrecks. They at once began sailing round the island and keeping it under guard, since the men on it were cut off. The Peloponnesians on the mainland, now reinforced from every quarter, stayed where they were at Pylos.

The generals accepted the proposal, and a truce was made on the following terms. The Spartans were to bring to Pylos and hand over to the Athenians the ships in which they had fought and all the warships in Laconia, and they were not to attack the fort by land or by sea. The Athenians were to allow the Spartans on the mainland to send in to the men on the island a fixed ration of food, already kneaded: two Attic choenices of barley meal for each man, two cotylae of wine, and meat, and half that amount for each attendant. These were to be sent in under the eyes of the Athenians, and no boat was to sail in secretly. The Athenians were to go on guarding the island no less than before, provided they did not land on it, and they were not to attack the Peloponnesian army by land or by sea.note

If either side broke any of these terms in any way whatever, the truce was at once to be void. It was to last until the Spartan envoys returned from Athens, and the Athenians were to take them there in a trireme and bring them back. When the envoys returned, this truce was to end, and the Athenians were to give back the ships in the same condition in which they had received them. The truce was made on these terms. The ships, about sixty in number, were handed over, and the envoys were sent off. When they arrived in Athens they spoke as follows:

You can see it by looking at our present misfortunes. We hold the greatest standing among the Greeks, and yet we have come to you asking for what we used to think we were better placed to grant. Yet this did not happen to us through any lack of power, nor because some increase in power made us arrogant. We misjudged the resources we have always had, and in that everyone is equally liable to go wrong. So it would not be reasonable for you, because of your city’s present strength and its recent gains, to suppose that fortune too will always be on your side.

Prudent men are those who have safely counted their advantages as uncertain (and the same men would also meet misfortune more intelligently). They recognize that a man does not engage with war only as far as he chooses to take on some part of it, but goes wherever chance leads him. Such men stumble least often, because they are not carried away by confidence in success, and they are the most ready to make peace while their fortune is good. This, Athenians, is what you now have a fine opportunity to do with us. Do it, so that you never come to be thought, later on, to have won even your present successes by chance, should you refuse our advice and then fail, as may happen in many ways. As things stand, you can leave behind for the future a reputation for strength and intelligence that carries no risk.

For the opponent is then under an obligation, not to retaliate as one who has been coerced, but to repay excellence in kind, and he is more ready, out of a sense of shame, to abide by what he has agreed. And people do this more toward their greater enemies than toward those with whom their differences were moderate. It is human nature to give way gladly in turn to those who yield of their own accord, but against arrogance to take risks even against one’s better judgment.

They are at war without knowing clearly which side started it. But if a settlement comes, and that is now mostly in your hands, they will give you the credit. If you so decide, you can become firm friends of the Spartans: they are themselves inviting it, and you will have done them a favor rather than coerced them. Consider how many advantages this is likely to contain. If we and you speak with one voice, you may be sure that the rest of the Greek world, being weaker, will treat what we say with the greatest respect.”

They were urged on above all by Cleon son of Cleaenetus, a popular leader at that time and the most persuasive man with the masses. He persuaded them to answer as follows. First, the men on the island must surrender their arms and themselves and be brought to Athens. When they had arrived, the Spartans must give back Nisaea, Pegae, Troezen and Achaea. The Athenians had not lost these places in war but had given them up under the earlier agreement, conceding them in a time of misfortune when they were in somewhat greater need of a treaty. Then the Spartans could recover the men and make a treaty for as long as both sides decided.note

The Spartans did not dispute this answer. Instead they asked the Athenians to choose commissioners to confer with them, who would discuss each point, speaking and listening in turn, and quietly agree on whatever they could persuade each other of. At this Cleon came down hard on them. He said he had known before that they had nothing honest in mind, and now it was plain: they were unwilling to say anything in front of the people, and wanted to confer with a few men. If they had any sound intention, he told them, let them state it before everyone. The Spartans saw that they could not speak before a crowd, even if their misfortune made them inclined to make some concession, for fear of being discredited with their allies if they spoke and did not succeed. They also saw that the Athenians would not grant what they proposed on moderate terms. So they left Athens without achieving anything.

As soon as they returned, the truce at Pylos was at an end, and the Spartans asked for their ships back, as had been agreed. But the Athenians complained of an attack on their fortification in breach of the truce, and of other matters that seemed of no importance, and refused to return them. They insisted that it had been stated that the truce would be void if there was any breach whatever. The Spartans protested, denounced the business of the ships as a wrong done to them, and went away to resume the war.

At Pylos the fighting was pressed hard by both sides. By day the Athenians kept two ships continually sailing round the island in opposite directions (at night the whole fleet lay at anchor round it, except on the seaward side when there was wind; twenty more ships had come from Athens to join the blockade, so that there were seventy in all). The Peloponnesians camped on the mainland and made assaults on the wall, watching for any opportunity that might arise to rescue the men.

For if they won at sea, they hoped to blockade Rhegium by land and sea and take it easily, and then their position would at once become strong. Since the promontory of Rhegium in Italy and Messana in Sicily lie close together, the Athenians would no longer be able to keep station there and control the strait. The strait is the stretch of sea between Rhegium and Messana, where Sicily is nearest to the mainland; it is the place called Charybdis, through which Odysseus is said to have sailed. Because it is narrow, and because the sea pours into it from two great expanses, the Tyrrhenian and the Sicilian, and is full of currents, it has naturally been thought dangerous.

In the meantime, then, the Syracusans and their allies, with a little over thirty ships, were forced late in the day to fight at sea over a merchant ship that was passing through. They put out against sixteen Athenian ships and eight from Rhegium. Defeated by the Athenians, they sailed off in haste, each group as best it could, to their own camps at Messana and at Rhegium, having lost one ship; and night fell on the action. After this the Locrians withdrew from Rhegian territory, and the ships of the Syracusans and their allies gathered at Pelorus, in the territory of Messana, and lay at anchor there with their land forces beside them.note

The Athenians and Rhegians sailed up, and seeing the ships empty of crews, attacked them; but they lost one ship of their own when a grappling iron was thrown onto it, its crew swimming away. After this, when the Syracusans had gone aboard and were being towed along the coast toward Messana, the Athenians attacked again. The enemy swung out to sea and rammed first, and the Athenians lost another ship. So in the passage along the coast and in the sea fight that developed in this way, the Syracusans had no worse of it, and they made their way into the harbor at Messana.

When the Naxians saw them, they took heart and urged one another on, telling themselves that the Leontines and their other Greek allies were coming to their aid. They suddenly sallied out of the city and fell on the Messanians, routed them and killed more than a thousand; the rest got home with difficulty, for the non-Greeks attacked them on the roads and killed most of them. The ships put in at Messana and later dispersed, each to its own home. The Leontines and their allies, together with the Athenians, at once marched against Messana, thinking it weakened. They attacked, the Athenians making an attempt with their ships on the harbor and the land army on the city.

But the Messanians, together with some Locrians under Demoteles who had been left there as a garrison after the disaster, made a sortie. Falling on the enemy suddenly, they routed most of the Leontine army and killed many. The Athenians saw this, landed from their ships and came to help; catching the Messanians in disorder, they chased them back into the city. They set up a trophy and returned to Rhegium. After this the Greeks in Sicily campaigned against one another by land, without the Athenians.

What discouraged them most was that the siege was dragging on far beyond expectation. They had thought to starve out within a few days men who were on a desert island and had only brackish water. The reason was that the Spartans had issued a proclamation inviting anyone who wished to bring into the island ground grain, wine, cheese and any other food that might be useful in a siege. They had fixed a large payment in silver for this, and promised freedom to any helot who brought supplies in. And supplies were brought in, by others who took the risk but above all by the helots. They would set out from wherever in the Peloponnese they happened to be and sail in, while it was still night, to the seaward side of the island.

Above all they waited for a wind to carry them in. They could more easily slip past the guard of triremes when the wind blew from the sea, since it then became impossible for the ships to lie at anchor round the island. The blockade-runners, for their part, could land with no thought for their boats: they ran them aground, since the boats had been valued in money beforehand, and the hoplites kept watch for them at the landing places on the island. But all who risked it in calm weather were caught. Divers also swam underwater into the harbor, towing behind them on a cord skins filled with poppy-seed mixed with honey and with pounded linseed. At first they went unnoticed, but later guards were posted against them. Each side tried every device, the one to send in food, the other to stop it slipping past them.note

Those who had come from Pylos advised that, if the Athenians did not believe them, they should send some inspectors, and Cleon himself was chosen by the Athenians as inspector, along with Theagenes. He realized that he would be forced either to report the same things as the men he was slandering, or else to say the opposite and be shown up as a liar. Seeing too that the Athenians were rather more inclined to send an expedition, he advised them not to send inspectors or to delay and let the moment slip, but, if they thought the reports were true, to sail against the men. And he pointed at Nicias son of Niceratus, who was a general, being his enemy and wanting to discredit him. It would be easy, he said, if the generals were real men, to sail with a proper force and take those on the island; he himself, if he were in command, would certainly do it.

So, with no way left to get out of what he had said, he undertook the expedition. He came forward and said that he was not afraid of the Spartans, and that he would sail without taking anyone from the city: only the Lemnians and Imbrians who were in Athens, the peltasts who had come as reinforcements from Aenus, and four hundred archers from elsewhere. With these, he said, in addition to the soldiers at Pylos, he would within twenty days either bring the Spartans back alive or kill them on the spot. His empty boasting raised something of a laugh among the Athenians. But the sensible men were pleased all the same, reckoning that they would get one of two good things: either they would be rid of Cleon, which they thought more likely, or, if they were wrong about that, he would deliver the Spartans into their hands.note

Because of the woods, the enemy’s mistakes and preparations would not be equally visible to the Athenians, whereas every mistake of their own army would be in plain view. So the enemy could fall on them unexpectedly wherever they chose, since the initiative would be theirs. If, on the other hand, he forced his way into the thick cover to close with them, he thought the smaller force that knew the ground would be stronger than the larger one that did not. His own army, large as it was, could be destroyed piecemeal without anyone noticing, since they would not be able to see where they ought to go to each other’s help.

It was not least the disaster in Aetolia, which had been due in part to the woods, that brought these thoughts to his mind. But the island was so cramped that the soldiers had been forced to put in at its edges and take their meals with an outpost guarding them. One of them accidentally set fire to a small part of the woods, and then a wind sprang up, and most of it burned down before anyone noticed. In this way Demosthenes could see more clearly that the Spartans were more numerous than he had thought, since he had earlier suspected that the food sent in was for fewer men. He could also see that the island was easier to land on. Now he judged it an undertaking worth the Athenians’ more serious effort, and he began preparing the attack, sending for troops from the allies nearby and getting everything else ready.note

When the Spartans did not accept, the Athenians waited one day. On the next they put all the hoplites aboard a few ships and set out by night. Shortly before dawn they began landing on both sides of the island, from the open sea and from the harbor side. There were about eight hundred hoplites, and they advanced at a run against the first guard post on the island.

This is how the Spartans were disposed. In this first post there were about thirty hoplites. Most of them, with Epitadas their commander, held the center, the flattest part of the island, around the water. A small detachment guarded the very end of the island facing Pylos, which was sheer on the sea side and very hard to attack from the land. There was also an old fort there, built of roughly gathered stones, which they thought would be useful to them if they were driven into a forced retreat. That was how they were deployed.

Under Demosthenes’ dispositions they split into groups of two hundred or more, in some places fewer, and occupied the highest points of ground. The aim was that the enemy, surrounded on every side, should be at the greatest possible loss, with no single body to form up against. Instead they would be exposed on both sides to sheer numbers. If they attacked those in front, they would be shot at by those behind; if they attacked those on one flank, by those posted on either side. Wherever they moved, there would always be enemies at their backs. These were light troops, the hardest of all to deal with, whose strength lay in arrows, javelins, stones and slings at long range, and whom it was impossible even to come to grips with. They won even as they fled, and pressed hard on their opponents whenever these withdrew.

Epitadas and his men, the main body of those on the island, saw that the first guard post had been wiped out and that an army was advancing on them. They formed up and moved against the Athenian hoplites, wanting to come to close quarters, since the hoplites had taken up position facing them while the light troops were on their flank and at their rear. But they could not engage the hoplites or make use of their own experience. The light troops held them off with missiles from both sides, and the hoplites did not advance to meet them but stayed where they were. Wherever the Spartans ran at the light troops and pressed them hardest, they drove them back. But these men turned and kept fighting. They were lightly equipped and easily got a head start in their flight. The ground was difficult and rough, because the island had never been inhabited, and in such ground the Spartans could not pursue them in their heavy armor.

For a short time they skirmished with each other in this way. But the Spartans could no longer dash out quickly wherever they were attacked, and the light troops saw that they were now slower to defend themselves. The light troops had also gained great confidence from seeing that they were many times more numerous. They had grown used to the Spartans, who no longer seemed as formidable to them, because they had not at once suffered what they expected when they first landed, their spirits cowed by the thought that they were going against Spartans. Now they felt contempt for them. They raised a shout and charged in a mass, pelting them with stones, arrows and javelins, whatever each man had to hand.

The shout that went up with the charge struck panic into men unused to this kind of fighting. Thick dust rose from the newly burned woods, and it was impossible to see what was in front of you for the arrows and stones flying from so many men together with the dust. At this point the action began to go hard for the Spartans. Their felt caps did not keep out the arrows, and javelins had broken off and stuck in them where they were hit. They could do nothing to help themselves. They were cut off from seeing ahead, and the louder shouting of the enemy kept them from hearing the orders given in their own ranks. Danger surrounded them on every side, and they had no hope of any means of defense that could save them.

At last, with many already wounded from constantly wheeling about in the same spot, they closed ranks and fell back to the fort at the far end of the island, which was not far off, and to their own guards there. Once they gave ground, the light troops, now emboldened, pressed on them with an even louder shout. Those Spartans who were caught as they retreated were killed. But most of them escaped to the fort and, with the guards stationed there, took up positions all along it, ready to defend it wherever it was open to attack.

The Athenians followed, but the strength of the position kept them from going round and encircling the Spartans, so they tried to dislodge them by attacking from the front. For a long time, most of the day, both sides held out, worn down by the fighting, by thirst and by the sun. One side tried to drive the enemy off the high ground, the other tried not to give way. The Spartans defended themselves more easily than before, since they could not be outflanked.

The Spartans were now being shot at from both sides. They were in the same predicament, to compare small things with great, as the men at Thermopylae. Those men were destroyed when the Persians came round by the path, and these men too, now attacked on both sides, held out no longer. Few were fighting against many, and their bodies were weak from lack of food, so they began to give way. The Athenians were now masters of the approaches.note

When they heard it, most of them lowered their shields and waved their hands, showing that they accepted the terms. After this a truce was made, and Cleon and Demosthenes met for talks with Styphon son of Pharax on the Spartan side. Of their earlier commanders, the first, Epitadas, was dead. The man chosen to succeed him, Hippagretas, was lying among the dead, still alive but taken for dead. Styphon himself had been chosen by law as third in command, should anything happen to the other two.

Styphon and those with him said they wanted to send a herald across to the Spartans on the mainland to ask what they should do. The Athenians would let none of them go, but they themselves called heralds over from the mainland. After questions had passed back and forth two or three times, the last man to cross over to them from the Spartans on the mainland brought this message: “[The] Spartans bid you decide for yourselves about yourselves, provided you do nothing dishonorable.” They then talked it over among themselves and surrendered their arms and themselves.

That day and the following night the Athenians kept them under guard. The next day the Athenians set up a trophy on the island, made everything else ready for sailing, and handed the men over to the trierarchs to guard. The Spartans sent a herald and took away their dead. These were the numbers killed and taken alive on the island. Four hundred and twenty hoplites in all had crossed over. Of these, eight short of three hundred were brought away alive, and the rest were killed. Of those taken alive, about a hundred and twenty were Spartiates. Not many Athenians were killed, since the battle was not fought at close quarters.

The Spartans had never before had any experience of raiding or warfare of this kind. Their helots were deserting, and they were afraid that revolution might spread still further through their country. They took it hard. Though they did not want the Athenians to see how they felt, they sent envoys to Athens and tried to get back Pylos and the men. But the Athenians were reaching for more, and although the envoys came again and again, they kept sending them away with nothing accomplished. That is what happened at Pylos.

From the beach where the ships put in, this village is twelve stades away, the city of Corinth sixty, and the Isthmus twenty. The Corinthians had learned in advance from Argos that the Athenian army was coming. Well beforehand they had gone to the Isthmus to meet it, all of them except those living beyond the Isthmus. Five hundred more were away on garrison duty in Ambracia and Leucas. The rest, in full force, were watching to see where the Athenians would put in. But the Athenians eluded them by sailing in at night, and when signals were raised to tell them, they left half their men at Cenchreae, in case the Athenians went against Crommyon, and hurried to the rescue.

Battus, one of the generals (two were present at the battle), took a company and went to guard the village of Solygeia, since it had no walls. Lycophron engaged with the rest. First the Corinthians fell on the Athenian right wing, which had just landed in front of Chersonesus, and then on the rest of the army as well. The battle was fierce and fought hand to hand throughout. The right wing, made up of the Athenians and the Carystians (the Carystians were posted at the end of the line), received the Corinthian attack and with difficulty pushed them back.

The Corinthians fell back to a dry-stone wall (the whole place was a slope) and pelted them with stones from above. Then they raised the paean and came on again, and when the Athenians met them the fighting was hand to hand once more. A company of Corinthians came up to support their own left wing, routed the Athenian right wing and chased it down to the sea. But from the ships the Athenians and Carystians turned and came back again. The rest of the army on both sides fought without a break, above all the Corinthian right wing, where Lycophron was, fighting against the Athenian left; for the Corinthians expected the Athenians to make an attempt on the village of Solygeia.note

For a long time they held out, neither side giving way. Then the Corinthians were routed, because the Athenians had their cavalry fighting alongside them and the other side had no horses. The Corinthians withdrew to the hill, grounded their arms there and did not come down again, but stayed where they were. Most of their losses came in this rout on the right wing, and among the dead was Lycophron the general. The rest of the army was not hotly pursued and did not break into headlong flight. When it was forced back, it withdrew in this manner to the high ground and took up a position there.

Since the enemy no longer came out to fight them, the Athenians stripped the enemy dead, took up their own, and immediately set up a trophy. Half the Corinthians had been stationed at Cenchreae as a guard in case the Athenians sailed against Crommyon. Mount Oneium hid the battle from their view. But when they saw the dust and [when] they realized what was happening, they came to help at once. The older Corinthians in the city also came out to help when they learned what had happened.

The Athenians saw them all advancing together and thought the neighboring Peloponnesians were coming to help. They withdrew in haste to their ships, taking the spoils and their own dead except for two, whom they left behind because they could not find them. They went aboard and crossed to the islands lying off the coast. From there they sent a herald and recovered under truce the dead they had left behind. In the battle the Corinthians lost two hundred and twelve men, and the Athenians a little under fifty.

The generals brought them across under truce to the island of Ptychia to be kept under guard until they could be sent to Athens. The condition was that if any one of them was caught trying to escape, the truce would be void for all of them. But the leaders of the Corcyraean people were afraid that the Athenians would not put the men to death once they reached Athens, and they devised the following scheme. They won over a few of the men on the island by secretly sending friends to them. These friends had been instructed to say, supposedly out of goodwill, that the best thing for them was to escape as quickly as possible, and that they themselves would have a boat ready. The Athenian generals, so they claimed, were about to hand them over to the Corcyraean people.

They persuaded them, and when the men sailed off in the boat that had been arranged for them, they were caught. The truce was broken, and all of them were handed over to the Corcyraeans. The Athenian generals did as much as anyone to bring this about, so that the pretext seemed genuine and the schemers could act with less fear. It was plain that, since they themselves were sailing on to Sicily, they did not want the men taken to Athens by others, who would get the credit for bringing them. The Corcyraeans took the men over and shut them up in a large building. Later they brought them out twenty at a time and led them between two lines of hoplites drawn up on either side. The prisoners were bound to one another, and the men in the lines struck and stabbed them whenever one of them saw a personal enemy. Men with whips walked beside them and hurried along those who moved more slowly.

In this way the Corcyraeans brought out and killed as many as sixty men without the others in the building realizing it, since they thought the men were being taken out to be moved somewhere else. But when they noticed, and someone told them, they called on the Athenians and told them to kill them themselves, if that was what they wanted. They refused to come out of the building any longer, and they said that they would let no one come in, as far as they were able to prevent it. The Corcyraeans for their part had no intention of forcing their way in through the doors. Instead they climbed onto the roof of the building, broke through the ceiling, and threw down the roof tiles and shot arrows at the men below.

The men inside protected themselves as best they could, and at the same time most of them were killing themselves. Some plunged into their throats the arrows that the Corcyraeans shot at them. Others hanged themselves with the cords from some beds that happened to be there and with strips torn from their clothes. For most of the night (for night fell upon their suffering) they made away with themselves in every way they could or were struck by those above, and so they perished. When day came, the Corcyraeans threw the bodies crosswise onto wagons, stacked like matting, and carted them out of the city.

The women who had been captured in the fortification were sold as slaves. In this way the Corcyraeans from the mountain were destroyed by the people, and the civil strife, which had been great, ended here, at least as far as this war was concerned, since nothing worth mentioning was left of the other side. The Athenians sailed off to Sicily, which had been their destination in the first place, and carried on the war with their allies there.

Their plan was to free the other cities known as the Actaean cities, which the Mytileneans had formerly occupied and the Athenians now held, and above all Antandrus. Antandrus offered ample means for building ships, since there was timber on the spot and Mount Ida rises above it, and there was the rest of the equipment as well. Once they had made the city strong, they meant to use it as a base from which they could easily harass Lesbos, which was close by, and subdue the Aeolian towns on the mainland. These were the preparations they intended to make.note

In the same summer the Athenians made an expedition against Cythera with sixty ships, two thousand hoplites, a few cavalry, and some of their allies, the Milesians and others. Their generals were Nicias son of Niceratus, Nicostratus son of Diitrephes and Autocles son of Tolmaeus. Cythera is an island lying off Laconia opposite Malea. Its inhabitants are Spartans of the perioeci, and an official called the “judge of Cythera” crossed over to it from Sparta every year. The Spartans also regularly sent over a garrison of hoplites and paid great attention to the place. It served them as a landing place for merchant ships from Egypt and Libya, and it also made pirates less able to trouble Laconia from the sea, the only side from which Laconia could be attacked, since the whole country juts out into the Sicilian and Cretan seas.

So the Athenians put in with their force. With ten ships and two thousand Milesian hoplites they took the town on the sea called Scandea. With the rest of the army they landed on the side of the island facing Malea and advanced against the [seaside] city of the Cytherians, where they found at once that all the inhabitants had encamped. In the battle that followed, the Cytherians held out for a short time. Then they were routed and fled to the upper city, and later they came to terms with Nicias and his fellow generals, agreeing to leave their fate to the Athenians, short of death.

Some talks had also taken place earlier between Nicias and certain of the Cytherians, and this is why the terms of the agreement were carried out more quickly and more favorably for them, both then and afterward. Otherwise the Athenians would have removed the Cytherians, since they were Spartans and their island lay so close off Laconia. After the agreement the Athenians took over Scandea, the town by the harbor, and put a garrison on Cythera. Then they sailed to Asine and Helos and most of the places along the coast, making landings and camping at whatever spots were convenient, and they laid waste the land for about seven days.

At the same time the many strokes of fortune that had befallen them unexpectedly in a short time caused them the greatest dismay, and they were afraid that some disaster like the one on the island might overtake them again. For this reason they were less daring in battle, and they thought that any move they made would go wrong. Their judgment had lost its confidence because they had never before been used to misfortune.

So when the Athenians laid waste the coastal country at that time, the Spartans for the most part stayed quiet whenever a landing took place near one of their garrisons. Each garrison thought itself outnumbered, and they were in the state of mind already described. One garrison, however, did put up a defense around Cotyrta and Aphroditia. It charged the mass of light troops, who were scattered, and routed them, but when the hoplites met its attack it fell back again. A few of its men were killed and some arms were captured, and the Athenians set up a trophy and sailed back to Cythera.

From there they sailed round to Epidaurus Limera, and after ravaging part of the land they came to Thyrea. Thyrea belongs to the district called Cynuria and lies on the border between Argive territory and Laconia. The Spartans held it, and they had given it to the Aeginetans to live in after they were expelled from Aegina. They did this because of the services the Aeginetans had done them at the time of the earthquake and the revolt of the helots, and because the Aeginetans, though subjects of the Athenians, had always taken the Spartan side in policy.note

They burned the city and plundered what was in it. Then they returned to Athens, bringing with them those of the Aeginetans who had not been killed in the fighting, and also the Spartan commander who had been with them, Tantalus son of Patrocles, who had been wounded and taken alive. They also brought a few men from Cythera whom they had thought it best to remove for safety’s sake. The Athenians decided to settle these men in the islands. The rest of the Cytherians were to live on their own land and pay a tribute of four talents. All the Aeginetans who had been captured were to be put to death because of the long-standing enmity between the two peoples. Tantalus was to be put in chains along with the other Spartans taken on the island.note

What happens is that to some the gains appear greater than the dangers, while others are willing to face the risks rather than accept some loss for the present. But if both sides are acting at the wrong moment, then advice to make peace is useful. That advice would be of the greatest value to us now, if we were persuaded by it. For it was in the belief, of course, that each of us was looking after his own interests well that we went to war in the first place. Now we are trying to be reconciled with one another through debate, and if after all it turns out that not every party can go away with a fair share, we shall go to war again.

They do not attack us out of hatred for one of the two stocks into which we are divided. They attack because they covet the good things of Sicily, which we possess in common. They have shown this just now in their response to the appeal of the Chalcidian people. Those people had never once come to their help under the alliance, and yet the Athenians have eagerly given them more than the agreement entitled them to. It is entirely forgivable that the Athenians should seek this advantage and plan ahead for it. I do not blame those who want to rule, but those who are too ready to submit. For human nature always rules what yields and guards against what attacks.

Those of us who know this and yet fail to look ahead correctly are making a mistake. So is anyone who has come here without judging the most important thing to be this: that we should all deal well with the danger that threatens us in common. The quickest way to be rid of it would be for us to come to terms with one another, for the Athenians do not set out from their own country but from the country of those who invited them in. In this way war is not ended by war; our differences are ended by peace, without trouble. And those who were called in, having come with a plausible pretext for wrongdoing, will go away with a good reason for having achieved nothing.

And if anyone thinks he will surely achieve something, whether through justice or by force, let him not be badly tripped up by the unexpected. Let him recognize that many men before now have pursued wrongdoers to punish them, and others have hoped to gain an advantage through some power. The first, far from avenging themselves, did not even survive, while the second, instead of gaining more, ended up losing what they had besides. For vengeance does not succeed as a matter of justice simply because a wrong has been done, nor is strength secure because it is confident. It is the unpredictability of the future that for the most part prevails. It is the most treacherous thing of all, and yet it also proves the most useful, for since we all fear it equally, we think twice before we attack one another.

For there is nothing shameful in kin giving way to kin, a Dorian to a Dorian or a Chalcidian to his own people. In short, we are neighbors, living together in a single country surrounded by the sea and called by a single name, Siceliots. We will go to war, I suppose, when it comes to that, and we will make terms again among ourselves, through discussions held in common. But foreign invaders we will always resist together, if we have any sense, since when we are harmed one by one, all of us are in danger. And we will never again call in allies or mediators. If we act in this way, we will not deprive Sicily of two good things in the present, riddance of the Athenians and of a war among ourselves. And for the future we will inhabit it by ourselves, free and less exposed to the designs of others.”

When the generals came home, the Athenians in the city punished two of them, Pythodorus and Sophocles, with exile, and fined the third, Eurymedon. Their charge was that the generals could have subdued Sicily but had been bribed into withdrawing. So far did the Athenians trust their present good fortune that they expected nothing to stand in their way. They thought they could achieve the possible and the more difficult alike, with a large force or an inadequate one equally. The cause was the unexpected success of most of their undertakings, which lent strength to their hopes.

The leaders of the people realized that under these hardships the people would not be able to hold out on their side. They took fright and opened talks with the Athenian generals, Hippocrates son of Ariphron and Demosthenes son of Alcisthenes. They wanted to hand the city over, considering this less dangerous for themselves than the return of the men they had expelled. They agreed that the Athenians should first seize the long walls, which ran about eight stades from the city to Nisaea, their harbor. That way the Peloponnesians could not come to the rescue from Nisaea, where they alone formed the garrison, to keep Megara secure. After that the leaders would try to hand over the upper city as well. Once the walls had been taken, the Megarians would be more ready to come over.note

As dawn was about to break, these Megarian traitors carried out the following plan. They had long been preparing the ground for opening the gates. With the commander’s permission, they had made a habit of carrying a two-oared skiff on a cart by night down through the ditch to the sea, as though they were going raiding, and sailing out. Before daylight they would bring it back on the cart to the wall and take it in through the gates. The supposed purpose was to leave the Athenians on Minoa nothing to watch, since no boat was ever to be seen in the harbor.

On this occasion the cart was already at the gates, and the gates were opened as usual for the skiff. The Athenians saw this (it was done by prearranged signal) and ran out of their ambush at full speed. They wanted to arrive before the gates were shut again, while the cart was still in the gateway and kept them from being closed. At the same moment the Megarians working with them killed the guards at the gates. The first to run in were the Plataeans and frontier guards with Demosthenes, at the spot where the trophy now stands. Just inside the gates the nearest Peloponnesians had become aware of what was happening, and the Plataeans fought and overcame the men coming to help. They held the gates secure for the Athenian hoplites as they came on;

and then each Athenian, as he got inside, advanced on the wall. At first the Peloponnesian garrison held out and defended themselves, few as they were, and some of them were killed. But most of them took to flight. They were frightened because the enemy had fallen on them at night and the Megarian traitors were fighting against them, and they thought that the Megarians as a whole had betrayed them. It so happened, too, that the Athenian herald, on his own initiative, proclaimed that any Megarian who wished should come and take his place in the ranks with the Athenians. When the garrison heard this, they held their ground no longer. Believing that they really were being attacked by both together, they fled to Nisaea.

At dawn the walls had been taken and the Megarians in the city were in an uproar. Those who had been dealing with the Athenians, and a number of others who were in on the plot, said that they ought to open the gates and march out to battle. They had agreed with the Athenians that when the gates were opened the Athenians would burst in. They themselves were going to anoint themselves with oil so as to be easily recognized and not be harmed. They had all the more security in opening the gates, because four thousand Athenian hoplites and six hundred cavalry had now arrived from Eleusis, as agreed, after marching through the night.

They had anointed themselves and were already near the gates when one of those in on the secret revealed the plot to the other side. These men banded together and came in a body. They said that the Megarians must not march out, since they had never dared to do this before, even when they were stronger, and must not lead the city into obvious danger. If anyone would not listen, they said, the battle would be fought right there. They gave no sign that they knew what was going on, but insisted that theirs was the best advice. At the same time they stayed by the gates on guard, so that the plotters were unable to carry out what they intended.

The Athenian generals saw that something had gone wrong and that they would not be able to take the city by force. They immediately began walling Nisaea off, thinking that if they could take it before anyone came to help, Megara too would come over sooner. Iron arrived quickly from Athens, along with stonemasons and everything else they needed. They started from the wall they held and built a cross-wall on the side facing Megara. From there the army divided up the work and ran a ditch and walls on both sides of Nisaea to the sea. They used stones and bricks from the suburb, and they cut down trees and timber to build a stockade wherever one was needed. The houses of the suburb, once given battlements, themselves served as a fortification.

They worked the whole of that day, and by the late afternoon of the next day the wall was all but finished. Those in Nisaea became afraid. They were short of food, since they drew their supplies from the upper city one day at a time. They did not think the Peloponnesians would come quickly to help, and they regarded the Megarians as enemies. So they came to terms with the Athenians. Each man would hand over his arms and be released for a fixed sum of money, and the Athenians could deal as they wished with the Spartans, the commander and any others who were there. On these terms they agreed and came out. The Athenians cut the long walls off from the city of Megara, took over Nisaea and went on with their other preparations.

But when he learned the truth (he had happened to set out by night for Tripodiscus), he picked three hundred men from his army before his arrival was known. He approached the city of Megara without being noticed by the Athenians, who were down by the sea. In word his aim was to make an attempt on Nisaea, and also in deed if he could. But his chief aim was to get into the city of Megara and make it secure. He asked the Megarians to let his men in, saying that he had hopes of recovering Nisaea.

But the factions in Megara were afraid. One side feared that he would bring the exiles back and throw them out. The other feared that the people, afraid of exactly that, would attack them, and that the city, fighting within itself while the Athenians lay in wait close by, would be destroyed. So they did not let him in, and both sides thought it best to keep quiet and watch what would happen. For each of them expected a battle between the Athenians and the relief force, and thought it would be safer to go over to whichever side they favored once it had won. Brasidas, when he could not persuade them, went back to the rest of his army.

but the Athenian cavalry rode out against them in turn and they came to close quarters. There was a long cavalry battle, in which each side claims not to have had the worse of it. The Athenians killed the Boeotian cavalry commander and a few others who had ridden right up to Nisaea itself, and stripped the bodies. Since they held these dead, they gave them back under a truce and set up a trophy. In the action as a whole, however, neither side came off with a decisive result when they parted. The Boeotians went back to their own forces, and the Athenians to Nisaea.

For the Athenians came out and drew up in line beside the long walls, but since the enemy did not attack, they too kept still. Their generals, too, reckoned that the risk was not evenly balanced for them. Most things had already gone their way. If they began a battle against superior numbers, they would either win and take Megara or fail and lose the best of their hoplites. The enemy, on the other hand, would naturally be willing to venture, since each contingent was risking only a part of the whole force present. They waited for some time, and when nothing was attempted by either side, the Athenians were the first to withdraw, to Nisaea, and then the Peloponnesians went back to where they had started from. So it was that the Megarians who were friends of the exiles took courage. Brasidas had won, they reasoned, since the Athenians had refused to fight any longer. So they opened the gates to Brasidas himself and to the commanders from the cities, let them in and entered into talks, while those who had dealt with the Athenians were by now thoroughly dismayed.

Later, when the allies had dispersed to their own cities, Brasidas himself went back to Corinth and went on preparing the expedition to the Thracian region, which had been his original aim. The Athenians too went home. Then those Megarians in the city who had been most involved in the dealings with the Athenians knew that they had been found out and immediately slipped away. The rest consulted with the friends of the exiles and brought back the men from Pegae. They bound them with solemn oaths to bear no grudges for the past and to give the city the best counsel.

But once the returned exiles were in office, they held a review of arms. They separated the companies and picked out about a hundred men, from among their enemies and from those thought to have been most involved in the dealings with the Athenians. They forced the people to vote on these men openly, and when they had been condemned, they put them to death and turned the city into an extreme oligarchy. And this change of government, made by so very few out of civil strife, lasted for a very long time.

so they gathered an army from the allies and sailed there. They defeated in battle the men who came out from Antandrus against them and took the place back. Not long afterward Lamachus, who had sailed into the Pontus, anchored in the river Cales in the territory of Heraclea. Rain fell upcountry and the flood came down suddenly, and he lost his ships. He himself and his army went by land through the Bithynian Thracians, who live across the water in Asia, and reached Calchedon, the Megarian colony at the mouth of the Pontus.note

The Athenians were to seize Delium, the sanctuary of Apollo in the territory of Tanagra that faces Euboea. All this was to happen at the same time, on a fixed day, so that the Boeotians would not rush together in full force to Delium but would each be busy with the trouble stirring in their own territory. If the attempt succeeded and Delium was fortified, they confidently expected that the situation would not stay as it was, even if no revolution in the Boeotians’ constitutions took place at once. These places would be held, the land would be raided, and each group would have a refuge close at hand. In time, with the Athenians coming to the support of those who had revolted and the others lacking a united force, they expected to settle matters to their advantage.

So if the Thessalians had not traditionally been governed by a narrow ruling group rather than under equal rights for all, he would never have got through. Even as it was, others from the opposing party met him on his march at the river Enipeus and tried to stop him, saying that he was doing wrong in passing through without the consent of the whole Thessalian commonwealth. His escorts said that they would not take him through against the others’ will. But he had turned up unexpectedly, they said, and they were his hosts and were conducting him on his way. Brasidas himself also said that he came as a friend to the land of Thessaly and its people, and that he was bearing arms against the Athenians, who were enemies, and not against them. He said that he knew of no hostility between the Thessalians and the Spartans that would keep them from using each other’s land. He would not go on now against their will, he said, since indeed he could not. But he did not think it right that he should be barred.

On hearing this they went away. Brasidas, on the advice of his escorts, pushed on at a run without stopping, before any larger force could gather to stop him. On the day he set out from Melitia he got as far as Pharsalus and camped on the river Apidanus. From there he went to Phacium, and from there into Perrhaebia. At this point the Thessalian escorts went back. The Perrhaebians, who are subjects of the Thessalians, brought him to Dium in Perdiccas’ realm, a small town of Macedonia that lies below Olympus, facing Thessaly.

In this way Brasidas ran through Thessaly before anyone could get ready to stop him, and reached Perdiccas and Chalcidice. For when things were going well for the Athenians, the peoples in the Thracian region who had revolted from Athens took fright, and so did Perdiccas, and they brought the army out from the Peloponnese. The Chalcidians thought the Athenians would attack them first, and at the same time the neighboring cities that had not revolted were secretly joining in the invitation. Perdiccas was not openly at war with Athens. But he too feared his old quarrels with the Athenians, and above all he wanted to subdue Arrhabaeus, king of the Lyncestians.

For since the Athenians were pressing hard on the Peloponnese, and not least on Spartan territory, the Spartans hoped that the best way to divert them was to trouble them in return by sending an army against their allies. This was all the more attractive because the allies were ready to maintain the army and were calling on them for help in revolting. At the same time the Spartans were glad of a pretext to send some of the helots away, in case they attempted some revolution in the present circumstances, with Pylos in enemy hands. They had even done the following, out of fear of the helots’ unruliness and their numbers (for most Spartan arrangements had always been designed above all for security against the helots):

The Spartans sent Brasidas himself mainly because he wanted to go (the Chalcidians were eager for him too). At Sparta he was considered energetic in everything, and once he had gone abroad he proved of the greatest value to the Spartans. In the short term, he showed himself just and moderate toward the cities and brought most of them to revolt, while some places he took by betrayal. As a result, when the Spartans wanted to come to terms, as they did, they had places to give back in exchange for others they wanted returned, and they could relieve the Peloponnese of the war. And in the later war, after the events in Sicily, the excellence and intelligence Brasidas showed at that time did more than anything to make the Athenians’ allies eager for the Spartans. Some had known these qualities by experience, and others believed in them from report. For he was the first to be sent out, and because he was thought good in every respect, he left behind a firm belief that the other Spartans were like him too.note

Perdiccas at once took Brasidas and his army, together with his own forces, and marched against Arrhabaeus son of Bromerus, king of the Lyncestian Macedonians. Arrhabaeus was his neighbor, and Perdiccas had a quarrel with him and wanted to subdue him. But when Perdiccas and his army, with Brasidas, reached the pass into Lyncus, Brasidas said he wanted first to go and try talking before resorting to war, and to make Arrhabaeus an ally of the Spartans if he could. For Arrhabaeus had in fact been sending heralds, ready to submit to Brasidas as a neutral arbitrator. The Chalcidian envoys who were with Brasidas kept urging him not to rid Perdiccas of his dangers, so that they could count on Perdiccas being more eager to serve their own interests too.

At the same time Perdiccas’ envoys at Sparta had said something to the effect that he would bring many of the places around him into alliance with the Spartans. Because of this, Brasidas felt entitled to deal with the matter of Arrhabaeus as a common concern rather than as Perdiccas’ alone. Perdiccas replied that he had not brought Brasidas to judge their disputes but rather to destroy whatever enemies he himself pointed out. Brasidas would be doing him wrong, he said, if he dealt with Arrhabaeus while Perdiccas was maintaining half the army. But Brasidas met Arrhabaeus against Perdiccas’ will and in defiance of him. Persuaded by what Arrhabaeus said, he withdrew his army before invading the country. After this Perdiccas provided a third of the army’s maintenance instead of half, considering himself wronged.

I am surprised that the gates were shut against me, and surprised if you are not glad that I have come. We Spartans thought we were coming to allies who had joined us in spirit at least, even before we actually arrived, and that we would be welcome. That is why we ran so great a risk, marching many days’ journey through foreign territory and showing every possible eagerness. If you have something else in mind, or if you intend to stand in the way of your own freedom and that of the rest of the Greeks, it would be a terrible thing.

For the trouble is not only that you yourselves resist me. Whoever else I approach will be less willing to join me. They will take it hard that you, the first people I came to, with a city of real consequence and a reputation for good sense, did not receive me. And I will not be able to give a convincing explanation. People will think either that the freedom I offer is not just, or that I have come too weak and powerless to protect you if the Athenians attack. Yet when I went to the help of Nisaea with this very army that [I] now have, the Athenians would not engage, although they outnumbered us. So they are not likely to send a naval force against you as large as the army they had at Nisaea.

I myself have come not to do harm but to free the Greeks. I have bound the Spartan authorities by the most solemn oaths that whoever I bring over will be independent allies. We are not here to win you over as allies by force or by deceit. Quite the opposite: we have come to be your allies, since you are enslaved by the Athenians. So I do not think I deserve to be suspected, when I am giving the strongest guarantees, or to be considered a powerless protector. I think you should come over to us with confidence. And if anyone is holding back out of private fear of some particular person, in case I hand the city over to some faction, he above all should trust me.

For I have not come to take part in civil strife. I do not think I would be bringing you genuine freedom if I disregarded your traditional constitution and enslaved the many to the few, or the few to the whole people. That would be harsher than foreign rule. We Spartans would get no gratitude for our efforts. Instead of honor and glory we would get blame. We would be seen committing ourselves the very offenses we charge the Athenians with in making war on them, and we would be more hateful for it than someone who had never made a show of excellence. For men of standing, gaining an advantage by specious deceit is more disgraceful than gaining it by open force. Force attacks by the right of strength, which chance has given. Deceit attacks by the scheming of an unjust mind.

That is how carefully we watch over matters of such great importance to us. Beyond our oaths, you could have no greater assurance than this: we are men whose deeds, when weighed against our words, compel the conclusion that it is in our interest to act just as we have said.

For otherwise we would have no good reason for acting like this, and we Spartans have no business freeing people who do not want it, except for the sake of some common good. Nor are we seeking empire. On the contrary, we are eager to put a stop to others’ empire. We would be wronging the majority if we brought independence to everyone and then let you stand in the way. Consider this, and deliberate well. Strive to be the first to begin freedom for the Greeks and to lay up glory for all time. Save your own property from harm, and crown your whole city with the finest of names.”

Hippocrates called out the entire Athenian population: the citizens themselves, the metics, and all the foreigners who were in the city. He arrived at Delium too late, after the Boeotians had already withdrawn from Siphae. He encamped his army and fortified Delium [the sanctuary of Apollo] in the following way. They dug a ditch all round the sanctuary and the temple, and they threw up the earth from the trench to serve as a wall. They drove stakes in alongside it, cut down the vines around the sanctuary and threw them in, along with stones and bricks pulled down from the nearby houses. In every way they could, they built the fortification up high.note

They also set up wooden towers where they were needed and where there was no building belonging to the sanctuary, for the colonnade that had stood there had collapsed. They began work on the third day after setting out from home, worked that day and the fourth, and on the fifth until the midday meal. Then, when most of the work had been finished, the army withdrew about ten stades from Delium as if to march home. Most of the light troops went straight on, while the hoplites grounded their arms and halted. Hippocrates stayed behind and was still posting guards and arranging for whatever remained of the outworks to be completed as it should be.

It is your ancestral custom to drive back a foreign army that attacks you, whether in your own land or in your neighbors’. Against the Athenians, who are our neighbors as well, this is far more necessary than against anyone. With neighbors, everyone’s freedom depends on being their match. These men try to enslave not only those near them but those far away as well. Against them above all, how can we not go to the very last extremity of struggle? We have as an example the Euboeans across the strait, and the condition of most of the rest of Greece under them. Other peoples fight their neighbors over boundaries. How can we not see that for us, if we are beaten, a single boundary will be fixed around our whole country, and no one will dispute it?

They will come in and hold what is ours by force. That is how much more dangerous these neighbors are than other people’s. Those who attack their neighbors out of confidence in their strength, as the Athenians are doing now, usually march with less fear against the man who keeps quiet and defends himself only in his own country. They are less ready to grapple with the one who goes out beyond his borders to meet them and, when the moment is right, starts the war himself. We have proof of this ourselves against these very men. They had occupied our country while we were torn by civil strife, and we beat them at Coronea and gave Boeotia a great security that has lasted until now.note

We must remember this. The older men among us must live up to their former deeds. The younger, sons of fathers who proved themselves brave in those days, must try not to disgrace the excellence that is their birthright. Let us trust that the god will be on our side, whose sanctuary they have fortified and occupy in defiance of law, and trust in the sacrifices, which have proved favorable to us. Then let us close with these men and show them this. Let them win what they covet by attacking people who do not defend themselves. But there are people whose noble way is always to free their own land by battle and never to enslave another’s unjustly, and from them they will not get away without a fight.”

The Boeotians posted a force opposite these to deal with them. When everything was ready, they appeared over the crest of the hill and took up position under arms in the order they intended. There were about seven thousand hoplites, more than ten thousand light troops, a thousand cavalry and five hundred peltasts. The Thebans and those grouped with them held the right wing. In the center were the Haliartians, the Coroneans, the Copaeans and the others who live around the lake. The left wing was held by the Thespians, the Tanagraeans and the Orchomenians. The cavalry and light troops were on each wing. The Thebans were drawn up twenty-five shields deep, the others in whatever depth each contingent happened to have. Such were the Boeotians’ forces and their order of battle.note

On the Athenian side, the hoplites, who were equal in number to the enemy, were drawn up eight deep along the whole line, with cavalry on each wing. Light troops properly equipped for the purpose were not present on this occasion, nor did the city have any. Those who had joined in the invasion were many times more numerous than the enemy’s, but many of them had come along unarmed, since this was a general levy of the citizens and of the foreigners who were in Athens. As soon as the army started for home, these men were gone, apart from a few. When the Athenians had taken their positions and were about to engage, Hippocrates the general passed along the Athenian line, encouraged the men and spoke as follows:

The men posted beside the Thespians gave way, and the Thespians were surrounded in a narrow space. Those of them who died were cut down fighting hand to hand. Some of the Athenians, too, were thrown into confusion as they encircled the enemy, failed to recognize one another and killed each other. So the Boeotians were beaten on this side and fled to the part of the line that was still fighting. But the right, where the Thebans were, was getting the better of the Athenians, pushing them back little by little at first and following up. When his left was in trouble, Pagondas had sent two squadrons of cavalry round the hill out of sight. They suddenly appeared over it, and the victorious Athenian wing thought another army was attacking and panicked. Now the whole Athenian army was put to flight, both by this and by the Thebans, who were following up and breaking through.

Some made for Delium and the sea, some for Oropus, others for Mount Parnes, and others wherever each saw some hope of safety. The Boeotians pursued them and killed them. The cavalry did most of the killing, both their own and the Locrians, who had come to their aid just as the rout was beginning. But night fell before the action was finished, and the mass of the fugitives escaped more easily. The next day the men who had reached Oropus and Delium left a garrison in Delium, which they still held in spite of everything, and went home by sea.

The Boeotians set up a trophy, took up their own dead and stripped those of the enemy. Then they left a guard and withdrew to Tanagra, and planned an assault on Delium.

When the herald had said this, the Athenians sent their own herald to the Boeotians. They said that they had done the sanctuary no wrong and would not willingly damage it in future. They had not entered it for that purpose in the first place, but to use it as a base for defending themselves against those who were really wronging them. The custom among the Greeks, they said, was that whoever held power over a territory, large or small, always held its sanctuaries too, and tended them with the customary rites and in whatever other ways they could.

The Boeotians themselves, and most others who had driven out some people by force and now occupied their land, had first attacked sanctuaries that belonged to others, and now possessed them as their own. If the Athenians had been able to conquer more of the Boeotians’ land, they would be holding that too. As it was, they would not willingly leave the part they now held, since they regarded it as their own. As for the water, they had disturbed it out of necessity, and they had not brought that necessity on themselves through insolence. They had been forced to use it while defending themselves against the Boeotians, who had invaded their land first. Anything done under the constraint of war and danger could reasonably expect some forgiveness, even from the god.

The altars were a refuge for involuntary offenses, and the word “transgression” was used of those who did evil without necessity, not of those who had been driven to a bold act by misfortune. The Boeotians, by demanding sanctuaries in exchange for the dead, were committing a far greater impiety than the Athenians, who refused to give up sanctuaries to recover what was rightfully theirs. The Athenians told them to say plainly that they could take up their dead under truce in accordance with ancestral custom, and not to make it a condition that they leave Boeotian land. They were no longer in the Boeotians’ land, they said, but in land they had won with the spear.

The Boeotians answered that if the Athenians were in Boeotia, they must leave Boeotian land and then take what was theirs. If they were in their own land, they knew for themselves what to do. The Boeotians reasoned as follows. The battle had been fought on the border, so the dead happened to be lying in the territory of Oropus, which belonged to the Athenians as subject territory. The Athenians could not get possession of the bodies by force against the Boeotians’ will. And the Boeotians were certainly not going to make a truce over land that was supposedly Athenian. So it seemed to them a respectable answer to say “leave our land and take back what you ask for.” The Athenian herald heard this and went away with nothing accomplished.note

They brought it up on wagons from a distance to the part of the wall built mostly of vine stems and timber. When it was close, they inserted large bellows into their own end of the beam and blew. The blast passed through the sealed pipe into the cauldron, which held lit coals, sulfur and pitch. This made a great flame and set the wall on fire, so that no one could stay on it any longer. The defenders abandoned it and fled, and in this way the fort was taken. Some of the garrison were killed and two hundred were captured. Most of the rest got on board the ships and were carried home.

Delium was taken on the seventeenth day after the battle. Not long afterward the Athenian herald, who knew nothing of what had happened, came again to ask for the dead, and this time the Boeotians gave them back and no longer gave the same answer. A little under five hundred Boeotians died in the battle. Of the Athenians a little under a thousand died, including Hippocrates the general, as well as a great number of light troops and baggage carriers.

Then, twenty-nine years after that, the Athenians came again, with Hagnon son of Nicias sent out as founder. They drove out the Edonians and founded a settlement on this site, which had formerly been called Nine Ways. They set out from Eion, a trading post they held on the coast at the mouth of the river, twenty-five stades from the present city. Hagnon named the city Amphipolis because the Strymon flows round it on both sides [because it encloses it]. He cut the site off with a long wall from river to river and settled a city there that could be seen from the sea and from the mainland alike.note

The Argilians were the most active of all. They lived close by, the Athenians had always suspected them, and they had always had designs on the place. When the opportunity came and Brasidas arrived, they had already been working for some time with those of their own people who were citizens there to have the city betrayed. Now they received him into their own city, revolted from the Athenians that night, and brought his army before dawn to the bridge over the river. The town lies some distance from the crossing, and walls did not run down to it then as they do now, but a small guard had been posted there. Brasidas easily overpowered it, partly because of the betrayal, and partly because of the storm and the surprise of his attack. Then he crossed the bridge, and at once he held everything that belonged to the Amphipolitans who lived outside the walls throughout the whole area.

His crossing took the people in the city by surprise. Many of those outside were being captured, and others were fleeing inside the walls. The Amphipolitans were thrown into great confusion, especially as they suspected one another. It is said that if Brasidas had not let his army turn to plunder, and had advanced on the city at once, he would probably have taken it. As it was, after overrunning the country outside, he settled his army in position. When nothing happened inside the city as he had expected, he waited.

When the majority heard this, they began to change their minds. Only a small part of the citizen body was Athenian; most were of mixed origin. Many also had relatives among those captured outside. Compared with what they had feared, they thought the proclamation was fair. The Athenians would be glad to leave, since they thought the danger was greater for them than for the others, and they did not expect help soon. The rest of the people would not lose their city and would keep equal rights in it, and they would be freed from danger beyond their hopes.

Those who were working for Brasidas now defended these terms openly, since they saw that the people had turned and were no longer listening to the Athenian general who was present. So the agreement was made, and they received Brasidas on the terms he had proclaimed. In this way they surrendered the city. Thucydides and his ships sailed into Eion late on that same day. Brasidas had only just taken Amphipolis, and he came within a night of taking Eion: if the ships had not come to the rescue quickly, it would have been taken at dawn.

They were also afraid that their allies would revolt. Brasidas showed himself moderate in every other respect, and in his speeches everywhere he declared that he had been sent out to liberate Greece. The cities subject to the Athenians heard of the capture of Amphipolis, of the terms he was offering, and of his mildness, and they were roused as never before to revolution. They sent messages to him in secret, urging him to come on to them, and each wanted to be the first to revolt.

They also felt they had nothing to fear. They had misjudged the Athenians’ power by as much as later became plain, and they judged more by uncertain wishing than by secure foresight. It is the habit of men to entrust what they desire to unthinking hope, and to thrust aside what they do not care for with arbitrary reasoning. At the same time the Athenians had recently taken a blow among the Boeotians. Brasidas was also saying, attractively but untruly, that at Nisaea the Athenians had refused to engage him and his army alone. So the cities grew bold and were convinced that no one would come against them.

Most of all, because of the immediate pleasure of it, and because for the first time they would be dealing with Spartans who were in earnest, they were ready to run any risk. The Athenians became aware of this and sent garrisons round to the cities, as far as they could at short notice and in winter. Brasidas sent to Sparta asking them to dispatch an additional army, and he himself prepared to build triremes on the Strymon. But the Spartans did not support him. This was partly out of envy on the part of their leading men, and partly because they were more anxious to get back the men from the island and to end the war.note

Its cities are Sane, a colony of the Andrians, right beside the canal and facing the sea toward Euboea, and the others: Thyssus, Cleonae, Acrothoi, Olophyxus and Dium. These are inhabited by mixed peoples of non-Greeks who speak two languages. There is also a small Chalcidian element, but most are Pelasgian, of the Tyrrhenians who once lived on Lemnos and at Athens, along with Bisaltians, Crestonians and Edonians. They live in small towns. Most of them came over to Brasidas, but Sane and Dium held out, so he stayed there with his army and laid waste their land.note

When they would not listen, he marched at once against Torone in Chalcidice, which was held by the Athenians. A few men were inviting him in, ready to hand the city over. He arrived while it was still night, and toward dawn he settled down with his army near the temple of the Dioscuri, about three stades from the city. The rest of the city of Torone and the Athenians garrisoning it did not notice him. But his collaborators knew he would come, and a few of them had secretly gone out ahead and were watching for his approach. When they saw he had arrived, they brought in to themselves seven light troops armed with daggers. Only that many of the twenty first assigned had not been too frightened to go in, and their leader was Lysistratus of Olynthus. These men slipped through the wall facing the sea and climbed up unnoticed. The city is built on a hill, and they killed the guards at the highest guard post and began breaking down the postern gate toward Canastraeum.

Meanwhile Brasidas advanced a little way with the rest of his army and waited quietly. He sent ahead a hundred peltasts, so that they could be the first to rush in whenever any gates were opened and the agreed signal raised. As time went on, they wondered at the delay and gradually drew near the city. The Toronaeans inside were making their preparations together with the men who had got in. Once the postern had been broken through, and the gates by the marketplace were being opened by cutting through the bar, they first brought some men round to the postern and let them in. They meant to strike sudden terror into the people in the city, who knew nothing, from the rear and from both sides. Then they raised the fire signal as had been arranged, and now they let in the rest of the peltasts through the gates by the marketplace.

When Brasidas saw the signal he set off at a run, getting his army to its feet. They raised a shout all together and caused great panic among those in the city. Some burst straight in through the gates. Others came in over squared beams that happened to be lying against the wall for hauling up stones, since the wall had fallen down and was being rebuilt. Brasidas and the main body turned at once upward toward the high parts of the city, wanting to take it from the top and so hold it securely. The rest of the crowd scattered in every direction alike.

When it was day and the city was securely held, Brasidas made a proclamation to the Toronaeans who had taken refuge with the Athenians. Anyone who wished could come out to his own property and live as a citizen without fear. To the Athenians he sent a herald, telling them to leave Lecythus under truce with their belongings, since it belonged to the Chalcidians. They refused to abandon it, but asked him to grant them a truce for one day to take up their dead. He granted two.

During those two days he fortified the houses nearby, and the Athenians fortified their own positions. He also called an assembly of the Toronaeans and spoke to them much as he had at Acanthus. He said it was not right to regard those who had arranged with him the taking of the city as worse men or as traitors. They had done it not to enslave the city, nor because they had been bribed, but for the good and the freedom of the city. Nor should those who had taken no part think they would not receive the same treatment. He had not come to destroy either a city or any private individual.

He had made the proclamation to those who had fled to the Athenians for this reason: he did not think them any the worse for their friendship with the Athenians. Once they had made trial of them [the Spartans], he did not think they would be any less well disposed toward them. They would be much more so, inasmuch as the Spartans acted more justly, and their present fear came from inexperience. He urged them all to prepare to be steadfast allies, and from now on to be held responsible for any wrong they did. As for the past, it was not the Spartans who had been wronged but rather the Toronaeans, by others stronger than they, and it was forgivable if they had opposed him in anything.

After speaking in this way and encouraging them, he began his assaults on Lecythus once the truce had run out. The Athenians defended themselves from a poor wall and from houses that had battlements, and for one day they beat the enemy off. The next day the enemy was about to bring up an engine against them, from which they intended to throw fire onto the wooden palisades, and the army was already advancing. The Athenians set up a wooden tower on top of a building at the point where they thought the engine was most likely to be brought up and which was most open to attack. They carried up many jars and casks of water and large stones, and many men climbed up. But the building took too great a load and suddenly collapsed with a great crash. This distressed the Athenians who were nearby and saw it more than it frightened them. Those farther off, and especially those farthest away, thought the place had already been taken at that point, and they rushed in flight to the sea and the ships.

Brasidas noticed that they were abandoning the battlements and saw what was happening. He charged with his army, took the fort at once, and killed all he caught inside. In this way the Athenians abandoned the place and crossed over to Pallene in their boats and ships. There is a temple of Athena in Lecythus, and when Brasidas was about to attack he had proclaimed that he would give thirty minas of silver to the first man to mount the wall. Believing that the capture had come about by some means other than human, he paid the thirty minas to the goddess for her temple. He pulled down and cleared Lecythus and dedicated the whole of it as a sacred precinct. For the rest of the winter he set in order the places he held and made plans against the others. So the winter ended, and with it the eighth year of the war.note

“The Spartans and the other allies have resolved the following, if the Athenians make a treaty. Each side shall remain in its own territory, keeping what we now hold. Those at Coryphasium shall stay within Buphras and Tomeus. Those on Cythera shall have no dealings with the alliance, neither we with them nor they with us. Those in Nisaea and Minoa shall not cross the road that runs from the gates by the shrine of Nisus to the temple of Poseidon, and from the temple of Poseidon straight to the bridge to Minoa; nor shall the Megarians and their allies cross this road. The Athenians shall keep the island they took, with neither side having dealings with the other in either direction. They shall keep what they now hold in Troezen, according to the terms agreed with the Athenians.note

“As to the use of the sea along their own coast and that of their alliance, the Spartans and their allies may sail not in a warship but in any other rowed vessel of up to five hundred talents’ burden. A herald or embassy, with as many attendants as they think fit, traveling to the Peloponnese or to Athens about ending the war or about legal disputes, shall have safe-conduct going and coming, by land and by sea. During this time neither you nor we shall receive deserters, whether free or slave.note

“You shall give legal satisfaction to us and we to you according to ancestral custom, settling disputes by arbitration without war. This is the resolution of the Spartans and the allies. If anything seems better or more just to you than this, come to Sparta and explain it to us. Neither the Spartans nor the allies will reject anything just that you propose. But let those who come have full powers, just as you also require of us. The treaty shall be for one year.”

Once across, he called an assembly of the Scionaeans and said what he had said at Acanthus and Torone. He added that they were most deserving of praise. Pallene was cut off at the isthmus by the Athenians, who held Potidaea, so the Scionaeans were in effect nothing but islanders. Even so, they had of their own accord come forward to claim their freedom. They had not been so lacking in courage as to wait until necessity was laid upon them in a matter plainly for their own good. This, he said, was a sign that they would bravely endure any other trial, even of the greatest. If things turned out as he intended, he would regard them as in truth the most loyal friends of the Spartans and would honor them in every other way.

The Scionaeans were elated by his words. All alike took heart, even those who had earlier disapproved of what was being done, and they resolved to carry on the war with zeal. They gave Brasidas a fine reception in every way. Publicly they crowned him with a golden crown as the liberator of Greece, and privately they decked him with ribbons and came up to him as if he were an athlete. For the moment he left a small garrison with them and crossed back. Not long afterward he brought over a larger army, wanting to make an attempt with them on Mende and Potidaea. He thought the Athenians would send help to Pallene as they would to an island, and he wanted to forestall them. He also had negotiations under way for the betrayal of these cities.

The Spartans sent envoys and said that the Athenians would be breaking the treaty. Trusting Brasidas, they laid claim to the city and were ready to have the question settled by arbitration. But the Athenians would not risk arbitration. They wanted to march as quickly as possible, furious that even people who lived on islands now thought fit to revolt from them, trusting in the Spartans’ strength on land, which could do them no good. And in fact the truth about the revolt lay more on the side the Athenians claimed, for the Scionaeans revolted two days after the agreement. The Athenians at once passed a decree, persuaded by Cleon’s motion, to capture the Scionaeans and put them to death. And keeping quiet in all other respects, they prepared for this.

As soon as the Athenians learned of it, they were angrier still, and they prepared to move against both cities. Brasidas, expecting their attack by sea, secretly removed the children and women of the Scionaeans and Mendaeans to Olynthus in Chalcidice. He sent over to them five hundred Peloponnesian hoplites and three hundred Chalcidian peltasts, with Polydamidas as commander of the whole force. The two cities, for their part, made joint preparations for their defense, expecting the Athenians to arrive soon.

The infantry of each side held a hill, with a plain lying between them. First the cavalry of both sides charged down into the plain and fought a cavalry battle. Then the Lyncestian hoplites advanced from their hill with their cavalry and stood ready to fight, and Brasidas and Perdiccas in turn led their own men forward. They engaged, routed the Lyncestians and killed many of them, while the rest escaped to the heights and kept quiet there. After this they set up a trophy and waited two or three days for the Illyrians, who as it happened were to come to Perdiccas as mercenaries. Then Perdiccas wanted to advance against Arrhabaeus’ villages rather than sit still. But Brasidas was not eager. He was anxious that Mende might come to some harm if the Athenians sailed there before he got back, and the Illyrians had not turned up either, so he was inclined rather to withdraw.

While they were at odds over this, news came that the Illyrians had betrayed Perdiccas and gone over to Arrhabaeus. So both of them now thought it best to withdraw, out of fear of these men, who were warlike. But because of their disagreement, nothing had been settled about when they should set out. Night came on, and the Macedonians and the mass of the non-Greeks were suddenly seized by fear, as great armies are apt to be struck by panic for no clear reason. They imagined that many times more men were coming against them than had actually come, and that the enemy were all but on them already. So they broke into sudden flight and made for home. At first Perdiccas did not notice. When he found out, they forced him to leave before he could see Brasidas, for the two were encamped a long way from each other.

At dawn Brasidas saw that the Macedonians had gone on ahead and that the Illyrians and Arrhabaeus were about to attack. So he too formed his hoplites into a square, took the crowd of light troops into the middle, and planned to retreat. He posted the youngest men to dash out wherever the enemy attacked. He himself, with three hundred picked men, meant to bring up the rear and, as he withdrew, to turn and fight off the foremost of the enemy as they pressed on him. Before the enemy came near, he encouraged his soldiers, as briefly as he could, as follows:

As for these non-Greeks, whom you now fear because you have no experience of them, you must learn that they will not be formidable. You can see this from your earlier fights against the Macedonians among them, and from what I myself infer and know from what others report. Whenever an enemy is weak in reality but looks strong, the truth about them, once learned, has made those defending against them bolder. Against an enemy who has some solid advantage, on the other hand, a man would attack more boldly if he did not know of it beforehand. These men are frightening to the inexperienced in the threat of what is coming. They are fearsome in the numbers they show the eye, their shouting is unbearably loud, and their brandishing of weapons in the empty air gives some show of menace.

But in hand-to-hand fighting against men who stand up to all this, they are not the same. They have no battle order, so they would feel no shame at abandoning any position when they are hard pressed. Flight and attack carry equal honor among them, so their courage is never put to the test. (A battle in which every man is his own master would give anyone the best excuse for saving his skin with decency.) And they think it surer to scare you off without danger to themselves than to come to close quarters with you. Otherwise they would have done that rather than this.

You can see clearly that all the terror they hold out in advance is slight in fact, however hard it hits the eye and the ear. If you stand up to its onset and, when the moment comes, withdraw again in good order and formation, you will reach safety all the sooner. And you will learn for the future that mobs like these brag of their courage from a distance, with threats of what they will do, against those who withstand their first charge. But against those who give way to them, they are quick to show their bravery at their heels, where it is safe.”

Seeing this, Brasidas ordered his three hundred to make for whichever of the two hills he thought they could more easily take. They were to run at it, each as fast as he could, without keeping formation, and try to dislodge the non-Greeks already on it before the larger encircling force could join them there. They charged and overcame those on the hill, and the main body of the Greek army now made its way there more easily. For the non-Greeks were frightened when their own men were routed from the high ground at that spot, and they pursued no further, thinking that the Greeks were already at the frontier and had escaped.

Once Brasidas had gained the heights, he went on in greater safety and reached Arnisa, the first town in Perdiccas’ dominions, the same day. The soldiers were angry on their own account at the Macedonians for retreating ahead of them. Whenever they came upon the Macedonians’ ox-teams along the road, they unyoked and slaughtered the oxen, and they took for themselves any baggage that had fallen off, as was likely to happen in a retreat made by night and in panic. From this time Perdiccas first regarded Brasidas as an enemy. From then on he harbored a hatred of the Peloponnesians that, given his hostility to the Athenians, went against his usual policy. But he broke away from his pressing interests and set about finding the quickest way to come to terms with the one and be rid of the other.

The Mendaeans themselves, three hundred Scionaeans who had come to help them, and the Peloponnesian auxiliaries, [and] in all seven hundred hoplites, together with their commander Polydamidas, happened to be encamped outside the city on a strong hill. Nicias, with a hundred and twenty light troops from Methone, sixty picked Athenian hoplites and all the archers, tried to climb the hill by a certain path. But his men took wounds from the defenders, and he could not force his way up. Nicostratus approached by another route from farther off with all the rest of the army, but the hill was hard to climb and he was thrown into complete confusion, and the whole Athenian army came close to being defeated. On that day, since the Mendaeans and their allies did not give way, the Athenians withdrew and encamped, and when night came the Mendaeans went back into the city.

The next day the Athenians sailed round to the side facing Scione, took the suburb, and spent the whole day ravaging the land. No one came out against them, for there was some civil strife in the city. The following night the three hundred Scionaeans went off home. On the next day Nicias advanced with half the army to the border with Scione, ravaging the land as he went, while Nicostratus with the rest sat down before the city at the upper gates, where the road leads to Potidaea.

Polydamidas drew up his men as if for battle and urged the Mendaeans to go out against the enemy (it happened that the Mendaeans’ and auxiliaries’ arms were stacked at that spot inside the wall). One of the popular party, in a factional spirit, answered him back that he would not go out and that they had no need to fight. When he answered back, Polydamidas dragged him by the arm and manhandled him. At once the people took up their arms and went in a fury for the Peloponnesians and for those who had worked with them against the people. They fell on them and routed them, partly because the fighting was so sudden and partly because the Peloponnesians were frightened when the gates were opened to the Athenians, for they thought the attack had been made by some prior arrangement.

Those who were not killed on the spot fled to the acropolis, which they had held before as well. The Athenians burst into the city of Mende (for Nicias too had now turned back and was at the city). Since the city had been opened without any terms of surrender, they plundered it with their whole army as though they had taken it by storm, and the generals had difficulty stopping them from killing the inhabitants as well. Afterward they told the Mendaeans to keep their constitution as they were accustomed, and to judge among themselves anyone they considered responsible for the revolt. Those on the acropolis they walled off with a wall running down to the sea on either side, and they posted a guard there. When they had settled affairs at Mende, they advanced on Scione.

The Scionaeans and the Peloponnesians came out against them and established themselves on a strong hill in front of the city. Unless the enemy took it, there could be no walling them in. The Athenians attacked the hill in force, drove off its defenders in battle, encamped, set up a trophy, and prepared to build the wall around the city. Not long afterward, when they were already at work, the auxiliaries who were under siege on the acropolis at Mende forced their way past the guard along the shore by night and arrived. Most of them got through the camp at Scione and entered the city.

Ischagoras, Ameinias and Aristeus, however, did make their way to Brasidas themselves, sent by the Spartans to inspect the situation. Contrary to law, they brought with them from Sparta some of their men of military age, to set them up as governors of the cities instead of entrusting the cities to whoever happened to be at hand. He installed Clearidas son of Cleonymus at Amphipolis and Pasitelidas son of Hegesander at Torone.

Pasitelidas, the Spartan commander, and the garrison that was there came out to defend this wall and fought off the Athenian assault. But they were being hard pressed, and at the same moment the ships sent round were sailing into the harbor. Pasitelidas was afraid that the ships would get there first and take the city with no one to defend it, and that he would be trapped if the wall fell, so he abandoned it and ran back to the city. But the Athenians got there before him: the men from the ships took Torone, and the land army, following close behind, burst in with them at the first rush through the breach in the old wall. Some of the Peloponnesians and Toronaeans they killed on the spot in hand-to-hand fighting; others they took alive, among them Pasitelidas the commander.

Brasidas was on his way to help Torone, but when he learned on the road that it had fallen, he turned back. He had been about forty stades short of arriving in time. Cleon and the Athenians set up two trophies, one by the harbor and the other at the wall. They enslaved the women and children of Torone, and sent the men themselves to Athens, together with the Peloponnesians and any other Chalcidians who were there, about seven hundred in all. Later the Peloponnesians among them went home under the treaty that was made, and the rest were recovered by the Olynthians in an exchange of man for man. Around the same time the Boeotians also took Panactum, an Athenian fort on the border, through treachery. Cleon, after stationing a garrison in Torone, set off and sailed round Athos to make for Amphipolis.note

Around the same time Phaeax son of Erasistratus, with two colleagues, sailed as an envoy to Italy and Sicily with two ships, sent by the Athenians. What had happened was this. After the Athenians left Sicily following the settlement, the Leontines had enrolled many new citizens, and the people were planning to redistribute the land. The powerful learned of it, brought in the Syracusans, and drove out the people. The people scattered, wandering wherever each of them could; the powerful came to terms with the Syracusans, abandoned their own city and left it deserted, and went to live at Syracuse, receiving citizenship there. Later some of them again left Syracuse because they were dissatisfied, and seized a place called Phocaeae, a quarter of the city of Leontini, and Bricinniae, a stronghold in Leontine territory.note

Most of the people who had been expelled at that time came to join them, and established in these strongholds they carried on a war. When the Athenians heard of this, they sent Phaeax to see whether they could somehow persuade their allies there, and the other Sicilian Greeks as well if they could, to join in a campaign against the Syracusans, on the grounds that Syracuse was building up its power, and so save the people of Leontini. When Phaeax arrived he won over the Camarinaeans and the Acragantines; but at Gela his business met opposition, and he did not go on to the others, since he saw he would not persuade them. Instead he went back through the territory of the Sicels to Catana, visiting Bricinniae on the way and encouraging them, and then sailed away.note

On his voyage to Sicily and back again he also negotiated with some cities in Italy about friendship with the Athenians. He also came across some Locrian settlers who had been expelled from Messana. After the agreement among the Sicilian Greeks, the Messanians had fallen into civil strife and one faction had called in the Locrians, and these men had been sent out as settlers, so that for a time Messana belonged to the Locrians. Phaeax, then, meeting them on their way home, did them no harm, because the Locrians had reached an understanding with him about coming to terms with the Athenians. For they alone of the allies had made no treaty with the Athenians when the Sicilian Greeks were reconciled, and they would not have done so now either, had they not been tied down by their war with the Hipponians and Medmaeans, who were their neighbors and their colonists. Phaeax arrived back at Athens some time later.

When Brasidas learned of this, he took up a position facing him on Cerdylium. This is a place belonging to the Argilians, on high ground across the river, not far from Amphipolis, and from it everything could be seen, so that Cleon could not have set his army in motion without Brasidas noticing. He expected Cleon to do just that: to go up against Amphipolis with the army he had, out of contempt for their numbers. At the same time he was getting ready fifteen hundred Thracian mercenaries and calling up all the Edonians, both peltasts and cavalry; and besides the troops in Amphipolis he had a thousand Myrcinian and Chalcidian peltasts. His hoplite force, when assembled, came to about two thousand in all, with three hundred Greek cavalry. Of these, Brasidas had about fifteen hundred with him on Cerdylium, and the rest were stationed in Amphipolis under Clearidas.note

For a while Cleon stayed quiet, but then he was forced to do exactly what Brasidas expected. His soldiers were fed up with sitting idle, and they kept reckoning up what his leadership would amount to—what inexperience and cowardice pitted against what experience and daring—and how unwillingly they had come out with him from home. He noticed their muttering, and not wanting them to grow sullen from sitting in one place, he broke camp and led them out. He used the same approach that had worked for him at Pylos and had convinced him he knew a thing or two. He did not even expect anyone to come out and fight him; he said rather that he was going up to look over the ground. And he was waiting for his larger force, not so as to be sure of winning should he be forced to fight, but so as to surround the city and take it by storm.

When he arrived, he posted his army on a strong hill in front of Amphipolis, and he himself surveyed the marshy stretch of the Strymon and the lie of the city in relation to Thrace. He thought he could leave without a fight whenever he liked, for no one was to be seen on the wall and no one came out through the gates, which were all shut. So he even thought he had made a mistake in not bringing siege engines with him, because he could have taken the city, since it was undefended.

As soon as Brasidas saw the Athenians on the move, he too came down from Cerdylium and entered Amphipolis. He did not march out and draw up his army against the Athenians, because he was afraid of his own forces and thought them inferior—not in numbers (the two sides were roughly equal) but in quality, since the Athenians had sent out a picked force of their own citizens, along with the best of the Lemnians and Imbrians. Instead he prepared to attack them by a stratagem.note

For if he showed the enemy the numbers of his men and their makeshift equipment, he did not think he would be as likely to win as if the enemy had not seen them beforehand, and their contempt was not grounded in the facts. So he picked out a hundred and fifty hoplites for himself, put Clearidas in charge of the rest, and planned to attack suddenly before the Athenians withdrew; he thought he would not catch them so isolated again if their reinforcements happened to arrive. He called all the soldiers together, wanting to encourage them and explain his plan, and spoke as follows:

The man who most clearly spots mistakes of this kind in the enemy, and who also matches his attack to his own strength—not so much openly and in pitched battle as according to what the moment makes advantageous—will succeed most often. And the stratagems that win the finest reputation are those by which a man most deceives his enemy and most helps his friends.

So while they are still unprepared and confident, and, as far as I can see, are thinking more about slipping away than about staying, while their minds are slack and before their judgment tightens up, I will take my own men and, if I can, catch them first, charging at a run into the middle of their army. And you, Clearidas, afterwards, when you see me already engaged and, as one would expect, throwing them into panic, take your own men, the Amphipolitans and the other allies, throw open the gates suddenly and rush out, and press on to close with them as fast as you can. This is our best hope of panicking them, for the force that comes on afterwards is more frightening to an enemy than the one already in front of him and fighting.

Prove yourself a brave man, as is fitting for a Spartiate; and you, allies, follow bravely. Remember that there are three things that make for fighting well: willingness, a sense of shame, and obedience to your commanders. Remember that this day, if you prove brave, you will have your freedom and the name of allies of the Spartans; otherwise you will be slaves of the Athenians—even if things go as well as they possibly can, and you are not sold into slavery or put to death—with a harsher slavery than you had before, and you will stand in the way of the liberation of the rest of the Greeks. So do not lose heart, when you see how much this struggle is for; and I will show that I am no better at urging others on than at going into action myself.”note

When he heard this he went up to look; and when he saw it, since he did not want to fight a battle before his reinforcements arrived and thought he could get away in time, he ordered the signal for retreat to be sounded, and at the same time gave orders that the troops withdrawing on the left wing should move off toward Eion, which was the only way possible. When he thought there was time enough, he wheeled the right wing himself and, exposing their unshielded side to the enemy, began to lead the army away. At this point Brasidas, seeing his opportunity and the Athenian army on the move, said to his own men and the rest: “These men aren’t going to wait for us.

You can tell by the way their spears and heads are moving; men who behave like that don’t usually stand up to an attack. Someone open the gates I mentioned for me, and let’s go out against them as fast as we can, with confidence.” He went out by the gate facing the palisade, the first gate in the long wall as it then stood, and ran at full speed straight along this road, where, as you go up the steepest part of the ground, a trophy now stands. He fell on the Athenians, who were frightened by their own disorder and stunned by his daring, and routed their center. And Clearidas, as he had been told, at the same moment came out by the Thracian Gates and bore down on them with his force.

So it came about that the Athenians, attacked unexpectedly and suddenly from both sides, were thrown into confusion. Their left wing, the one toward Eion, which had in fact already moved off ahead, at once broke away and fled. As it was already retreating, Brasidas was moving on against the right wing when he was wounded. The Athenians did not notice his fall, and those near him picked him up and carried him away. The Athenian right held its ground better. Cleon, since he had never meant to stand and fight in the first place, fled at once, and was overtaken and killed by a Myrcinian peltast; but his hoplites rallied together on the hill and held off Clearidas, who attacked them two or three times, and they did not give way until the Myrcinian and Chalcidian cavalry and the peltasts surrounded them, showered them with javelins and put them to flight.

So now the whole Athenian army was in flight, struggling along and taking many different routes over the mountains; all who were not killed, either on the spot in hand-to-hand fighting or by the Chalcidian cavalry and the peltasts, made their way back to Eion. The men who had lifted Brasidas out of the battle and carried him to safety brought him into the city still breathing. He learned that his men were winning, and not long afterwards he died. The rest of the army, returning with Clearidas from the pursuit, stripped the dead and set up a trophy.

After this all the allies, following in arms, gave Brasidas a public funeral in the city, in front of what is now the agora. Ever since, the Amphipolitans have fenced off his tomb and offer sacrifices to him as a hero, and they have given him honors in the form of games and yearly sacrifices. They also made the colony over to him as its founder, pulling down the buildings of Hagnon and obliterating anything that might have survived as a memorial of his founding. They regarded Brasidas as their savior, and at the same time, at that moment, they were courting the Spartan alliance out of fear of the Athenians; while Hagnon, given their state of war with the Athenians, could not hold the honors either to their advantage or to their liking as before.note

They gave the dead back to the Athenians. About six hundred of the Athenians were killed, and seven of their opponents, because the battle was not fought in regular order but arose from the circumstances I have described and from a panic that struck first. After recovering their dead, the Athenians sailed home, and those with Clearidas set about settling affairs at Amphipolis.

So it came about that, right after the battle at Amphipolis and Rhamphias’ withdrawal from Thessaly, neither side took up the war again, and both were inclined toward peace instead. The Athenians had taken a blow at Delium and, a short while later, another at Amphipolis. They no longer had the confident hope in their strength that had led them to reject the treaty earlier, when they thought their good fortune at the time would carry them to victory. They also feared that their allies, encouraged by their setbacks, would revolt on a wider scale, and they regretted not having come to terms after the events at Pylos, when a good opportunity had offered itself.

The Spartans, for their part, found the war turning out contrary to their expectations. They had thought they would destroy the power of the Athenians within a few years if they laid waste their land. Instead they had met with the disaster on the island, such as had never yet befallen Sparta. Their territory was being raided from Pylos and Cythera, the helots were deserting, and there was a constant fear that those who remained would rely on those outside and, taking advantage of the present situation, stir up revolution as they had before. It also happened that their thirty-year peace with the Argives was about to expire, and the Argives refused to make another unless someone gave the land of Cynuria back to them. So it seemed impossible to fight the Argives and the Athenians at the same time. They also suspected that some of the cities in the Peloponnese would go over to the Argives—which is exactly what happened.note

But now the Athenians had also suffered the defeat at Amphipolis, and Cleon and Brasidas were dead—the two men who on either side had most opposed peace. Brasidas did so because war brought him success and honor; Cleon because he thought that once quiet returned his misdeeds would be more conspicuous and his slanders less believed. It was then that the men in each city who were striving hardest for the leading position—Pleistoanax son of Pausanias, king of the Spartans, and Nicias son of Niceratus, who had been more successful in his commands than anyone of his time—became far more eager still. Nicias wanted,

while he was still unscathed and held in esteem, to preserve his good fortune. He wanted to rest from his labors for the present and give his fellow citizens rest, and to leave behind for the future the name of a man who had come through life without ever bringing disaster on the city. He thought that this came from avoiding risk and from trusting oneself to chance as little as possible, and that peace was what kept one free from risk. Pleistoanax, for his part, was being slandered by his enemies over his restoration. Every time the Spartans suffered a setback, his enemies held it up to them as a matter of religious scruple, claiming that these things were happening because his return had been against the law.

For they accused him and his brother Aristocles of having persuaded the prophetess at Delphi to give this answer, over a long period, to the Spartan envoys who came to consult her: that they should bring back the seed of the demigod son of Zeus from a foreign land to their own, or else they would plow with a silver plowshare. And so in time, they said, she induced the Spartans to bring him back. He was in exile at Lycaeum because of his withdrawal from Attica years before, which was thought to have been bought with bribes, and out of fear of the Spartans he was living in a house half of which lay inside the sanctuary of Zeus. In the nineteenth year they brought him back with the same choruses and sacrifices with which they had installed their kings when they first founded Sparta.note

Vexed by this slander, then, he thought that in peacetime, with no setbacks occurring and the Spartans recovering their men, he too would be beyond his enemies’ reproach, whereas while war lasted those in leading positions were always bound to be slandered for its misfortunes. So he was eager for the agreement.

Throughout this winter, then, they held talks. As spring approached, the Spartans first brandished their preparations, sending word round the cities to get ready for building a fort in Attica, so that the Athenians would be more inclined to listen. Then, after meetings at which each side put forward many claims against the other, it was agreed that peace should be made with each side giving back what it had taken in war, but that the Athenians should keep Nisaea. (When the Athenians demanded Plataea back, the Thebans said that they held the place not by force but because its people had come over to them by agreement and without betrayal; and the Athenians said they held Nisaea in the same way.) At that point the Spartans summoned their own allies. All except the Boeotians, Corinthians, Eleans and Megarians voted to make peace (these did not like what was being done), and the Spartans concluded the agreement: they made the treaty with the Athenians and swore to it, and the Athenians did the same toward the Spartans, as follows:note

It shall not be permitted to take up arms with intent to harm, either for the Spartans and their allies against the Athenians and their allies, or for the Athenians and their allies against the Spartans and their allies, by any art or device whatever. If there is any dispute between them, they shall resort to legal process and oaths, in whatever way they agree. The Spartans and their allies shall give Amphipolis back to the Athenians. From all the cities that the Spartans handed over to the Athenians, the inhabitants shall be permitted to leave for wherever they wish, taking their property with them. These cities, paying the tribute assessed in the time of Aristides, shall be autonomous. Once the treaty has been made, neither the Athenians nor their allies shall be permitted to take up arms against them to do them harm, so long as they pay the tribute.note

These cities are Argilus, Stagirus, Acanthus, Scolus, Olynthus and Spartolus. They shall be allies of neither side, neither of the Spartans nor of the Athenians; but if the Athenians persuade the cities, they may, with the cities’ consent, make them their own allies. The Mecybernaeans, Sanaeans and Singaeans shall live in their own cities, like the Olynthians and Acanthians. The Spartans and their allies shall give Panactum back to the Athenians. The Athenians in turn shall give back to the Spartans Coryphasium, Cythera, Methana, Pteleum and Atalanta, and all the Spartans who are in the public prison at Athens or in public custody anywhere else in the Athenian dominions;note

and they shall release the Peloponnesians under siege in Scione, and all the other allies of the Spartans who are in Scione, and those whom Brasidas sent in, and any of the Spartans’ allies who is in public custody at Athens or anywhere else in the Athenian dominions. The Spartans and their allies shall likewise give back any of the Athenians and their allies whom they hold. As for the Scionaeans, Toronaeans and Sermylians, and any other city that the Athenians hold, the Athenians shall decide about them and about the other cities as they see fit. The Athenians shall swear oaths to the Spartans and their allies city by city.

Each side shall swear the oath that is most binding in its own country, seventeen men from each city. The oath shall be as follows: ‘I will abide by this agreement and this treaty justly and without fraud.’ The Spartans and their allies shall swear an oath to the Athenians on the same terms, and both sides shall renew the oath every year. They shall set up inscribed pillars at Olympia, at Pytho, at the Isthmus, at Athens on the Acropolis, and at Sparta in the Amyclaeum. If either side has forgotten anything, on any point whatever, it shall be consistent with their oaths for both sides, after fair discussion, to change it in whatever way seems good to both, the Athenians and the Spartans.note

He himself went in haste to Sparta with envoys from there, to defend himself in case Ischagoras and his colleagues accused him of disobedience, and at the same time wanting to know whether the agreement could still be altered. When he found that the Spartans were committed to it, he hurried back, the Spartans sending him off with orders, preferably, to hand over the place as well, and if not, to bring out all the Peloponnesians who were in it.

This shall be done justly, zealously and without fraud. If the slave population rises in revolt, the Athenians shall come to the aid of the Spartans with all their strength, to the best of their ability. These terms shall be sworn by the same men on each side who swore the other treaty. The oath shall be renewed every year, by the Spartans coming to Athens for the Dionysia and by the Athenians going to Sparta for the Hyacinthia. Each side shall set up an inscribed pillar, the one at Sparta beside Apollo in the Amyclaeum, the other at Athens on the Acropolis beside Athena. If the Spartans and the Athenians decide to add anything to or remove anything from the terms of the alliance, whatever they decide shall be consistent with the oaths of both.”note

Let him look at the facts as they have been set out, and he will find that it is not reasonable to judge it a peace. In it neither side gave back or received everything it had agreed to; besides this, there were violations on both sides in the Mantinean and Epidaurian war and in other matters; the allies in the Thracian region were no less hostile than before; and the Boeotians kept only a ten-day truce. So, taking the first, ten-year war together with the uneasy truce that followed it and the war that later grew out of that, one will find, reckoning by the seasons, this many years and a few days over. And for those who put their trust in oracles, here was the one prediction that proved reliable.

For I myself remember that all along, from the beginning of the war until its end, many people were putting it about that it was destined to last three times nine years. I lived through the whole of it, old enough to understand and applying my mind to it, so that I might know something accurately. It also happened that I was exiled from my own country for twenty years after my command at Amphipolis; and being present on both sides—not least, because of my exile, on the Peloponnesian side—I was able at my leisure to understand more of what happened. So I shall now describe the dispute after the ten years, the breakdown of the treaty, and how the war was fought after that.

The Argives who had heard them reported the proposals to the magistrates and the people. The Argives passed the decree and chose twelve men with whom any Greek who wished might make an alliance, except the Athenians and the Spartans; with neither of these were the twelve permitted to make a treaty without the Argive people. The Argives accepted this all the more readily because they saw that war with the Spartans was coming (their treaty with them was about to expire). At the same time they hoped to take the leadership of the Peloponnese. For at this time Sparta had fallen into very bad repute and was held in contempt because of its disasters, while the Argives were in excellent shape in every respect. They had taken no part in the war with Athens, but, being at peace with both sides, had reaped the profits. So the Argives in this way began admitting into the alliance any Greeks who wished,

and the Mantineans and their allies were the first to come over to them, out of fear of the Spartans. For the Mantineans had subjugated part of Arcadia while the war with Athens was still going on, and they believed that the Spartans, now that they had leisure, would not stand by and let them keep their rule. So they gladly turned to the Argives, regarding Argos as a great city, always at odds with the Spartans, and a democracy like themselves.note

Once the Mantineans had defected, the rest of the Peloponnese also began to murmur that they ought to do the same. They supposed that the Mantineans must have known something more to change sides, and at the same time they were angry with the Spartans. Among other things, it had been written into the treaty with Athens that it would be consistent with the oaths to add or remove anything that both cities, the Spartans and the Athenians, agreed on. This clause more than anything unsettled the Peloponnese and made them suspect that the Spartans wanted to enslave them with the help of the Athenians; for justice required that the power of amendment be granted to all the allies. So most of them, out of fear, were eager each to make an alliance with the Argives themselves.

The Corinthians, with those of their allies present who had likewise not accepted the treaty (they had invited them beforehand themselves), answered the Spartans. They did not state openly the wrongs they had suffered—that they had not recovered Sollium or Anactorium from the Athenians, or anything else in which they thought themselves shortchanged. Instead they made a pretext of not betraying their allies in Thrace. They had sworn oaths to them, they said, both privately, when those allies first revolted together with the Potidaeans, and others later. So they were not breaking the oaths of the allies by not entering the treaty with Athens; having sworn pledges by the gods to those people, they would be breaking their oaths if they betrayed them.note

The treaty said “unless there is some obstacle from gods or heroes”; this, then, they thought plainly was a divine obstacle. That was what they said about the old oaths. As for the Argive alliance, they would consult with their friends and do whatever was right. The Spartan envoys went home. Argive envoys also happened to be present in Corinth, urging the Corinthians to join the alliance without delay; the Corinthians told them to come to their next assembly.

An embassy from Elis also came at once and made an alliance first with the Corinthians; then, going on from there to Argos, the Eleans became allies of the Argives on the terms already proclaimed. They happened to be at odds with the Spartans over Lepreum. Some time before, the Lepreans had been at war with some of the Arcadians, and had called in the Eleans as allies in return for half their land. When the Eleans had ended the war, they left the land to the Lepreans themselves to farm, on condition that they pay a talent a year to Olympian Zeus. The Lepreans paid it until the war with Athens; then they stopped, using the war as a pretext, and the Eleans tried to force them, whereupon they turned to the Spartans. The case was referred to the Spartans for arbitration, but the Eleans, suspecting that they would not get fair treatment, renounced the arbitration and ravaged the Lepreans’ land.note

The Spartans nonetheless gave judgment that the Lepreans were independent and that the Eleans were in the wrong, and, on the ground that the Eleans had not abided by the arbitration, sent a garrison of hoplites into Lepreum. The Eleans considered that the Spartans had taken in a city that had revolted from them, and they pointed to the agreement which laid down that whatever places each party held when it entered the war with Athens, it should hold when it came out. So, holding that they had not been treated fairly, they went over to the Argives, and they too made the alliance on the terms already proclaimed. Immediately after them the Corinthians and the Chalcidians in Thrace also became allies of the Argives. The Boeotians and the Megarians, who took the same line, held back. They were left to themselves by the Spartans, and they thought that the Argive democracy would suit them, as oligarchies, less well than the Spartan constitution.note

and they asked the Boeotians to go with them to Athens and obtain for them too the ten-day truce that the Athenians and Boeotians had made with each other not long after [this] fifty-year treaty, [on the same terms as the Boeotians had it,] and, if the Athenians refused, to renounce the armistice and in future make no treaty without them. In answer to this request the Boeotians told the Corinthians to hold off on the matter of the Argive alliance; but they went to Athens with them. They did not obtain the ten-day truce: the Athenians replied that the Corinthians already had a treaty, if they were allies of the Spartans. The Boeotians, for all that, did not renounce their ten-day truce, though the Corinthians demanded it and accused them of having agreed to do so. And the Corinthians had a cessation of hostilities with the Athenians, but no treaty.note

The same summer the Spartans marched out in full force, under the command of Pleistoanax son of Pausanias, king of the Spartans, against the Parrhasians in Arcadia. These were subjects of the Mantineans, and one faction in a civil conflict had called the Spartans in. At the same time the Spartans meant to destroy, if they could, the fort at Cypsela, which the Mantineans had built and garrisoned themselves; it lay in Parrhasian territory, facing the Sciritis in Laconia. The Spartans ravaged the land of the Parrhasians, while the Mantineans handed their city over to an Argive garrison and themselves guarded their allied territory. But since they were unable to save both the fort at Cypsela and the Parrhasian towns, they withdrew. The Spartans made the Parrhasians independent, demolished the fort, and went home.

So the Athenians, seeing none of this happen in deed, suspected that the Spartans had no just intentions. Accordingly they would not give back Pylos when the Spartans asked for it; they even regretted having returned the prisoners from the island, and they held on to the other places, waiting until the Spartans for their part did what had been agreed. The Spartans said they had done what they could. They had returned the Athenian prisoners in their hands, withdrawn their soldiers from Thrace, and done the same with anything else in their power. Amphipolis, they said, they did not control, and so could not hand it over; but they would try to bring the Boeotians and the Corinthians into the treaty, to recover Panactum, and to bring back all the Athenian prisoners held in Boeotia.note

having first become allies of the Argives themselves, to make the Argives, together with the Boeotians, allies of the Spartans. (In this way, they said, the Boeotians would be least likely to be forced into the treaty with Athens; for the Spartans would choose to have the Argives as their friends and allies even at the cost of enmity with Athens and the dissolution of the treaty. The ephors knew that the Spartans had always wanted Argos to be on good and friendly terms with them.) They thought that with this done, a war outside the Peloponnese would be easier. They did ask the Boeotians, however, to hand Panactum over to the Spartans, so that they might recover Pylos in exchange for it, if they could, and so find it easier to go to war with the Athenians.

The Boeotians and the Corinthians, having received these instructions from Xenares and Cleobulus and their friends among the Spartans, to report to their governments, went home, each to their own city. But two men of the highest magistracy at Argos watched for them on their way and, meeting them, opened talks to see whether the Boeotians might become their allies, as the Corinthians, Eleans and Mantineans had. If this went forward, they said, they thought they could then readily make war or make a treaty, even with the Spartans if they wished, speaking with one voice, and with anyone else if need be. The Boeotian envoys were pleased to hear this; for, as chance would have it, the Argives were asking for the very things their friends in Sparta had instructed them to do.

When the Argives saw that the Boeotians welcomed the proposal, they said they would send envoys to Boeotia, and departed. On their return the Boeotians reported to the boeotarchs both what had been said at Sparta and what the Argives who had met them had proposed. The boeotarchs were pleased and far more eager, because it had turned out on both sides that the friends of the Spartans were asking for the same thing and the Argives were pressing for the like. Not long afterwards Argive envoys arrived with the proposals already described; the boeotarchs sent them away with praise for their proposals, promising to send envoys to Argos about the alliance.note

But the members of the Boeotian councils did not accept the proposal, fearing that they would be acting against the Spartans if they swore alliance with the Corinthians, who had broken away from them. For the boeotarchs had not told them what had passed at Sparta—that Cleobulus and Xenares among the ephors, and their friends, were advising them to become allies first of the Argives and the Corinthians and afterwards to join with the Spartans. They thought that the council, even if they did not tell it, would vote for nothing other than what they had decided beforehand and recommended. When the plan met this opposition, the Corinthians and the envoys from Thrace went away with nothing achieved. The boeotarchs, who had previously meant, if they carried this, to try to make the alliance with the Argives as well, no longer brought the question of the Argives before the councils, nor did they send to Argos the envoys they had promised; a certain negligence and delay hung over the whole business.

The Argives were therefore at a loss. They were afraid of having to fight the Spartans, the Tegeans, the Boeotians and the Athenians all at once, though they had earlier refused the Spartans’ treaty and in their pride had expected to lead the Peloponnese. So they sent envoys to Sparta as quickly as they could: Eustrophus and Aeson, who were thought to be the men the Spartans liked best. They judged that in the present circumstances their best course was to make a treaty with the Spartans on whatever terms they could get, and keep quiet.

When the envoys arrived, they opened talks with the Spartans on the terms on which the treaty might be made. At first the Argives demanded that the question of the territory of Cynuria be referred to arbitration, either by some city or by a private individual. The two sides are always quarreling over this land, since it lies on the border; it contains Thyrea and the town of Anthene, and the Spartans occupy it. Then the Spartans refused to let it even be mentioned, but said that if the Argives wanted a treaty on the same terms as before, they were ready. Even so, the Argive envoys induced the Spartans to agree to the following: for the present they would make a treaty for fifty years; but either side would be allowed, on issuing a challenge, to fight it out for this land, provided that there was neither plague nor war at Sparta or at Argos, just as they had once done before, when each side claimed the victory; and pursuit would not be allowed beyond the boundaries of Argos and Sparta.note