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History of the Peloponnesian WarNotes
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Book 1

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88 The Lacedaemonians voted that the treaty had been broken and that they must go to war, not so much because they had been persuaded by the arguments of their allies as because they feared the Athenians and the further growth of their power, seeing that most of Hellas was already in their hands.

89 For it was in the following way that the Athenians came to the position in which they grew great. When the Medes withdrew from Europe, defeated by the Hellenes on sea and on land, and those of them who had fled with their ships to Mycale had been destroyed, Leotychides, king of the Lacedaemonians, who had led the Hellenes at Mycale,1 went home with the allies from the Peloponnese. But the Athenians, and the allies from Ionia and the Hellespont who had by now revolted from the King, stayed on and laid siege to Sestos, which the Medes held. They spent the winter before it and took it after the barbarians abandoned it; and after that they sailed away from the Hellespont, each to his own city. As for the Athenian people, as soon as the barbarians had left their country they began to bring back their children, their wives, and what remained of their belongings from the places where they had put them for safety, and they prepared to rebuild the city and its walls. For only short stretches of the circuit wall were still standing, and most of the houses had fallen; a few survived, those in which the Persian grandees had themselves been quartered.

90 The Lacedaemonians saw what was coming and sent an embassy. In part they themselves would have preferred to see neither the Athenians nor anyone else with a wall; but they acted chiefly because their allies urged them on, alarmed at the size of the Athenian navy, which had not existed before, and at the daring the Athenians had shown in the Median war. They asked the Athenians not to build walls, and instead to join them in pulling down the circuit walls of all the cities outside the Peloponnese that still had them standing. They did not reveal to the Athenians what they really wanted or what they suspected; the reason they gave was that the barbarian, if he came again, would then have no strong place to start from, as he had lately started from Thebes. The Peloponnese, they said, was enough for everyone, both as a refuge and as a base. On the advice of Themistocles, the Athenians answered that they would send envoys to Sparta about what the Lacedaemonians proposed, and dismissed them at once. Themistocles then told the Athenians to send him to Lacedaemon as quickly as possible; 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 to the minimum height from which it could be defended; and meanwhile to have everyone in the city, the whole population, men, women, and children, build the wall, sparing no building, private or public, that could be of any use to the work, but pulling everything down. Having given these instructions, and hinted that he would see to everything else at Sparta himself, he left. When he reached Lacedaemon he did not go to the authorities, but kept putting it off and making excuses. Whenever one of those in office asked him why he did not appear before the public authorities, he said he was waiting for his fellow envoys: some business had kept them behind, but he expected them to arrive soon and was surprised that they were not there yet.

91 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. When he learned of this, he told them not to be misled by talk, but rather to send men of their own, men of good character, who would look and report faithfully. So they sent them; and Themistocles sent word about them secretly to the Athenians, telling them to detain these men as inconspicuously as possible and not to let them go until he and his colleagues were safely home. (For his fellow envoys, Abronichus son of Lysicles and Aristides son of Lysimachus, had by now joined him, with the news that the wall was high enough.) He feared that the Lacedaemonians, once they heard the plain truth, would not let them go. So the Athenians detained the envoys as instructed, and Themistocles went before the Lacedaemonians and there at last spoke openly. Their city, he said, was now walled, strongly enough to protect its inhabitants; if the Lacedaemonians or their allies wished to send embassies to them, they should come in the future as to men capable of judging both their own interests and the common interest. When they had thought it better to abandon their city and take to the ships, they had made that daring decision, he said, without the Lacedaemonians; and in everything they had deliberated on together with them, they had shown themselves second to none in judgment. So now, too, it seemed better to them that their city should have a wall, and this would be of more use both to their own citizens in particular and to the allies as a whole. For it was impossible to have an equal or even a similar voice in common deliberations without a matching strength behind it. Either, then, he said, all the members of the alliance must be without walls, or they must accept that this, too, was right.

92 When the Lacedaemonians heard this, they showed no open anger at the Athenians, for they had sent their embassy not to stop them but, so they said, to offer advice for the common good; and besides, they were at that time on the friendliest terms with them, because of the zeal they had shown against the Mede. Still, they had failed to get what they wanted, and they were secretly aggrieved. The envoys of each side went home without formal complaint.

93 In this way the Athenians walled their city in a short time. The construction shows even now that it was done in haste. The foundations are laid with stones of every kind, in places not even shaped to fit but set just as each was brought up at the time, and many gravestones and stones already worked for other purposes were built into it. For the circuit of the city was carried out farther on every side, and so they hurried, sparing nothing. Themistocles also persuaded them to finish building Piraeus (a start had been made on it earlier, during the year he held office as archon at Athens). He judged the site a fine one, with its three natural harbors, and thought that the Athenians, now that they had become a seafaring people, would gain a great advantage from it in acquiring power; for he was the first who dared to say that they must lay hold of the sea, and he at once began helping to lay the foundations of the empire. On his advice they built the wall to the thickness that can still be seen around Piraeus: it was wide enough for two wagons, going in opposite directions, to pass each other as they brought up the stones. Inside there was neither rubble nor clay, but large stones, cut square, fitted together and bound to one another on the outside with iron clamps and lead. The height was carried to only about half of what he intended. He wanted the size and thickness of the wall to keep off the designs of enemies, and he thought that a few men, and those the least fit for service, would be enough to guard it, while the rest manned the ships. For he gave his attention above all to the fleet, having seen, as it seems to me, that the King’s army had an easier approach by sea than by land. He considered Piraeus more useful than the upper city, and he often advised the Athenians that if they were ever overpowered by land, they should go down to it and with their ships resist all comers. This, then, was how the Athenians were walled and made their other preparations immediately after the withdrawal of the Medes.

94 Pausanias son of Cleombrotus was sent out from Lacedaemon as general of the Hellenes, with twenty ships from the Peloponnese; the Athenians sailed with him with thirty ships, and a number of the other allies. They campaigned against Cyprus and subdued most of it, and afterward against Byzantium, which the Medes held, and took it by siege, still under Spartan leadership.

95 But he was already behaving with violence, and the other Hellenes resented it, not least the Ionians and all those who had recently been freed from the King. They kept coming to the Athenians and asking them to become their leaders, on the ground of kinship, and not to give way to Pausanias if he tried to use force anywhere. The Athenians accepted these proposals and turned their minds to the matter, resolved not to stand by and to settle everything else as seemed best to them. Meanwhile the Lacedaemonians recalled Pausanias to question him about what they had been hearing; for the Hellenes who came to Sparta accused him of great injustice, and his conduct looked more like an imitation of tyranny than a generalship. It so happened that his recall came at the very time when the allies, out of hatred for him, went over to the Athenians, all except the soldiers from the Peloponnese. When he came to Lacedaemon he was found guilty of the wrongs he had done to particular individuals, but acquitted on the gravest charges. Not the least of the charges against him was Medism, collusion with the Mede, and it seemed the best founded of all. They did not send him out again as commander, but sent Dorcis and some others with him, with no large force. The allies would no longer grant them the leadership; and when they saw this they went home. After that the Lacedaemonians sent out no more commanders, for fear that those who went abroad would be corrupted, as they had seen happen with Pausanias. They also wanted to be rid of the Median war, and they thought the Athenians capable of leading it and, at that time, well disposed toward themselves.

96 In this way the Athenians took over the leadership, with the allies’ consent, because of the hatred felt for Pausanias. They fixed which of the cities were to provide money for the war against the barbarian and which ships; the declared aim was to avenge what they had suffered by laying waste the King’s territory. It was then that the Athenians first set up the office of the Hellenotamiae, the “treasurers of Hellas,” who received the tribute; for this was the name given to the contribution of money. The first tribute was assessed at 460 talents. Their treasury was at Delos, and the congresses were held in the temple there.

97 As leaders of allies who were at first autonomous and deliberated in common congresses, they carried out the following enterprises, in war and in the management of affairs, between the Median war and this one: against the barbarian, against their own allies when these rebelled, and against such Peloponnesians as came into conflict with them on each occasion. I have written of these things, and allowed myself this digression from my account, for this reason: this period had been left out by all my predecessors, who wrote either of the affairs of Hellas before the Median wars or of the Median wars themselves; and the one who did touch on these events, Hellanicus, in his Attic History,2 mentioned them briefly and with inaccurate dates. The account also shows, at the same time, how the Athenian empire came to be established.

98 First, under the command of Cimon son of Miltiades, they besieged and took Eion on the Strymon, which the Medes held, and enslaved its people. Next they enslaved the people of Scyros, the island in the Aegean inhabited by Dolopians, and settled it themselves. They had a war with the Carystians, without the rest of Euboea, and in time the two sides came to terms. After this they made war on the Naxians, who had revolted, and reduced them by siege; and this was the first allied city to be enslaved contrary to the established terms. Afterward the same thing happened to the others, as each case arose.

99 There were various causes of the revolts, but the chief ones were arrears in tribute or ships and, in some cases, failure to serve. For the Athenians exacted everything strictly, and they made themselves offensive by applying compulsion to men who were neither used to hardship nor willing to endure it. In other ways too the Athenians were no longer so popular as rulers; they did not share in campaigns on equal terms, and it was easy for them to bring back into line those who revolted. For this the allies had only themselves to blame. Because of their reluctance to go on campaign, most of them, to avoid being away from home, had themselves assessed to pay their share of the cost in money instead of ships. So the Athenian navy grew on the money they contributed, while they themselves, whenever they revolted, entered the war unprepared and without experience.

100 After this came the battle, on land and at sea, at the river Eurymedon in Pamphylia, between the Athenians and their allies and the Medes. The Athenians won both on the same day, under the command of Cimon son of Miltiades, and took or destroyed Phoenician triremes to the number of two hundred in all. Some time later the Thasians revolted from them, after a quarrel over the trading posts on the facing coast of Thrace and the mine they worked. The Athenians sailed against Thasos with a fleet, won a battle at sea, and landed on the island. About the same time they sent ten thousand settlers, their own people and allies, to the Strymon, to colonize the place then called Nine Ways and now Amphipolis. They made themselves masters of Nine Ways, which the Edonians held; but when they advanced into the interior of Thrace they were destroyed at Drabescus in Edonia by the Thracians acting all together, who regarded the founding of a settlement at Nine Ways as an act of war.

101 The Thasians, defeated in battle and under siege, appealed to the Lacedaemonians and urged them to come to their aid by invading Attica. The Lacedaemonians promised to do so, without the knowledge of the Athenians, and intended to; but they were prevented by the earthquake that occurred, during which their Helots, and from among the Perioeci the Thuriates and the Aethaeans, revolted from them and went to Ithome. Most of the Helots were descendants of the old Messenians who had been enslaved in former times; and so all of them were called Messenians. The Lacedaemonians, then, had a war on their hands against those in Ithome; and 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; they agreed to pay at once whatever money was required and to pay tribute in the future; and they gave up their holdings on the mainland and the mine.

102 As the war against those in Ithome dragged on, the Lacedaemonians called in their allies, the Athenians among them; and the Athenians came, under the command of Cimon, in no small numbers. They had been called in chiefly because they were thought to be good at assaulting walls; but because the siege had dragged on so long, the Lacedaemonians themselves were evidently lacking in this skill, for otherwise they would have taken the place by storm. It was out of this campaign that the first open quarrel arose between the Lacedaemonians and the Athenians. When the place could not be taken by storm, the Lacedaemonians, fearing the daring and the revolutionary spirit of the Athenians, and regarding them besides as men of another race, became afraid that if they stayed they might be persuaded by those in Ithome to make some revolutionary move. So they sent them away, alone of the allies, not revealing their suspicion, but saying that they had no further need of them. The Athenians recognized that they were not being sent away on the more respectable ground, but because some suspicion had arisen. They resented it, feeling that they had not deserved such treatment from the Lacedaemonians, and as soon as they had returned home they renounced the alliance they had made with them against the Mede and became allies of the Argives, the Lacedaemonians’ enemies; and both alike entered into the same oaths and alliance with the Thessalians.

103 Those in Ithome, in the tenth year, when they could hold out no longer, came to terms with the Lacedaemonians: they were to leave the Peloponnese under a truce and never set foot in it again, and if any of them were caught there, he was to be the slave of whoever seized him. The Lacedaemonians had also received, some time before, an oracle from Delphi telling them to let the suppliant of Zeus of Ithome go free. So they came out, the men with their children and wives, and the Athenians, out of the hostility they now felt toward the Lacedaemonians, took them in and settled them at Naupactus, which they had recently captured from the Ozolian Locrians who held it. The Megarians, too, went over to the Athenians as allies, revolting from the Lacedaemonians, because the Corinthians were pressing them hard in a war over boundaries. So the Athenians held Megara and Pegae; they built the Megarians their long walls from the city to Nisaea and garrisoned them themselves. It was from this, above all, that the Corinthians’ violent hatred of the Athenians first began.

104 Inaros son of Psammetichus, a Libyan, king of the Libyans who border on Egypt, setting out from Marea, the city above Pharos, brought most of Egypt to revolt from King Artaxerxes. Having made himself ruler, he called in the Athenians. They happened to be campaigning against Cyprus with two hundred ships of their own and their allies; they left Cyprus and came. They sailed up the Nile from the sea, and making themselves masters of the river and of two parts of Memphis, they made war on the third part, which is called the White Wall. Inside it were the Persians and Medes who had fled there, and those Egyptians who had not joined the revolt.

105 The Athenians made a landing from their ships at Halieis, and a battle took place there against the Corinthians and Epidaurians; the Corinthians won. Later the Athenians fought a sea battle off Cecryphaleia against a Peloponnesian fleet, and the Athenians won. After this war broke out between the Athenians and the Aeginetans, and a great sea battle was fought off Aegina between the Athenians and the Aeginetans, with the allies of each side present. The Athenians won, took seventy of their ships, landed on the island, and laid siege to the city, under the command of Leocrates son of Stroebus. Then the Peloponnesians, wishing to help the Aeginetans, first sent over to Aegina three hundred hoplites, auxiliaries of the Corinthians and Epidaurians; then 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; or that if they did help, they would have to raise the siege of Aegina. But the Athenians did not move the army at Aegina; of those left in the city, the oldest and the youngest went to Megara under the command of Myronides. A battle was fought against the Corinthians that came out even, and the two sides separated, each thinking it had not had the worse of the action. The Athenians, who had in fact had rather the better of it, set up a trophy when the Corinthians withdrew. But the Corinthians, taunted by the older men in their city, made their preparations, and about twelve days later they came back and set up a trophy of their own, as though they too had won. The Athenians sallied out from Megara, killed the men who were setting up the trophy, engaged the rest, and defeated them.

106 The defeated army fell back, and a sizable part of it, hard pressed and having lost its way, blundered onto a private estate that happened to be enclosed by a great ditch, with no way out. When the Athenians saw this, they blocked them in from the front with their hoplites, posted their light-armed troops in a ring around them, and stoned to death every man who had gone in. This was a heavy blow to the Corinthians. The main body of their army returned home.

107 About this time the Athenians also began to build their long walls down to the sea, the one to Phalerum and the one to Piraeus. The Phocians campaigned against Doris, the mother country of the Lacedaemonians, with its towns of Boeum, Cytinium, and Erineum, and took one of these towns. The Lacedaemonians, led by Nicomedes son of Cleombrotus in place of King Pleistoanax son of Pausanias, who was still a minor, came to the aid of the Dorians with 1,500 hoplites of their own and 10,000 of their allies, compelled the Phocians to give the town back on terms, and set out for home. If they wanted to cross by sea, through the Crisaean Gulf, the Athenians were ready to sail around with a fleet and stop them; and the route over Geraneia did not look safe to them while the Athenians held Megara and Pegae. For Geraneia was hard to cross and was always guarded by the Athenians, and on this occasion they learned that the Athenians meant to stop them there too. So they decided to wait in Boeotia and consider how they might get through most safely. In part, too, certain Athenians were secretly inviting them in, hoping to put an end to the democracy and to the building of the long walls. The Athenians marched out against them in full force, with a thousand Argives and contingents from each of their other allies; altogether they numbered 14,000. They marched against them because they thought the enemy were at a loss how to get through, and partly also on suspicion of a plot to overthrow the democracy. Thessalian cavalry also came to the Athenians under the terms of the alliance, but in the course of the action they went over to the Lacedaemonians.

108 A battle was fought at Tanagra in Boeotia, and the Lacedaemonians and their allies won; there was great slaughter on both sides. The Lacedaemonians went into the Megarid, cut down the trees, and returned home by way of Geraneia and the Isthmus. On the sixty-second day after the battle the Athenians marched against the Boeotians under the command of Myronides, defeated them in a battle at Oenophyta, and became masters of Boeotia and Phocis. They pulled down the wall of Tanagra, took a hundred of the richest of the Opuntian Locrians as hostages, and completed their own long walls. After this the Aeginetans, too, came to terms with the Athenians: they pulled down their walls, handed over their ships, and agreed to pay tribute in the future. And the Athenians sailed around the Peloponnese under the command of Tolmides son of Tolmaeus; they burned the dockyard of the Lacedaemonians, took Chalcis, a Corinthian town, and defeated the Sicyonians in battle after making a landing on their territory.

109 The Athenians and their allies in Egypt stayed on, and the war there took many forms. At first the Athenians were masters of Egypt, and the King sent a Persian named Megabazus to Lacedaemon with money, so that the Peloponnesians might be persuaded to invade Attica and so draw the Athenians away from Egypt. When this made no headway and the money was being spent to no purpose, Megabazus was brought back to Asia with what was left of it, and the King sent Megabyzus son of Zopyrus, a Persian, with a large army. He arrived by land, defeated the Egyptians and their allies in battle, drove the Hellenes out of Memphis, and finally shut them up on the island of Prosopitis, where he besieged them for a year and six months. At last he drained the canal and turned the water off elsewhere, leaving their ships high and dry and making most of the island part of the mainland; then he crossed over and took the island on foot.

110 So the cause of the Hellenes was lost after six years of war. A few out of many made their way through Libya to Cyrene and were saved; most of them perished. Egypt came under the King again, except for Amyrtaeus, the king in the marshes. Him they could not capture, because of the extent of the marsh; and besides, the marsh people are the best fighters among the Egyptians. Inaros, the king of the Libyans, who had been responsible for everything that was done in Egypt, was taken by treachery and impaled. Fifty triremes from Athens and the rest of the alliance, sailing to Egypt to relieve the others, put in at the Mendesian mouth of the Nile knowing nothing of what had happened. Infantry fell on them from the land and a Phoenician fleet from the sea, and destroyed most of the ships; the smaller part got away. Such was the end of the great expedition of the Athenians and their allies to Egypt.

111 Orestes son of Echecratidas, the king of the Thessalians, had been exiled from Thessaly, and he persuaded the Athenians to restore him. Taking along the Boeotians and the Phocians, who were their allies, the Athenians marched against Pharsalus in Thessaly. They were masters of the countryside, so far as they could be without going far from their camp, for the Thessalian cavalry kept them in check; but they did not take the city, and nothing else for which they had come succeeded either. They went back again with Orestes, having achieved nothing. Not long after this a thousand Athenians went aboard the ships at Pegae (Pegae was in their hands), sailed along the coast to Sicyon under the command of Pericles son of Xanthippus, landed, and defeated those of the Sicyonians who engaged them. At once they took the Achaeans on board, crossed the gulf, and marched against Oeniadae in Acarnania and besieged it. They did not take it, however, but went home.

112 Three years later a five years’ truce was made between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians. The Athenians held off from war in Hellas, and campaigned against Cyprus with two hundred ships of their own and their allies, under the command of Cimon. Sixty of these ships sailed off to Egypt, at the request of Amyrtaeus, the king in the marshes, and the rest besieged Citium. When Cimon died and food ran short, they withdrew from Citium, and sailing off Salamis in Cyprus they fought the Phoenicians, Cyprians, and Cilicians at sea and on land at once. They won both battles and went home, and with them the ships that had come back from Egypt. After this the Lacedaemonians undertook the so-called Sacred War: they took control of the temple at Delphi and handed it over to the Delphians. Later, after they withdrew, the Athenians marched out in their turn, took control of it, and handed it over to the Phocians.

113 Some time after this, when Boeotian exiles held Orchomenus, Chaeronea, and some other places in Boeotia, the Athenians marched against these places, which were hostile to them, with a thousand hoplites of their own and the contingents of each of their allies, under the command of Tolmides son of Tolmaeus. They took Chaeronea, enslaved its people, left a garrison, and started back. On the march, at Coronea, they were attacked by the Boeotian exiles from Orchomenus, together with Locrians, Euboean exiles, and all who were of the same mind. These defeated them in battle, killing some of the Athenians and taking others alive. The Athenians then evacuated the whole of Boeotia, making a treaty on condition that they should recover their men. The Boeotian exiles came home, and they and all the others became independent again.

114 Not long after this Euboea revolted from the Athenians. Pericles had already crossed over to it with an Athenian army when the news reached him that Megara had revolted, that the Peloponnesians were about to invade Attica, and that the Athenian garrison had been destroyed by the Megarians, except for those who had escaped to Nisaea. The Megarians had called in the Corinthians, Sicyonians, and Epidaurians and then revolted. Pericles brought the army back from Euboea in haste. After this the Peloponnesians invaded Attica as far as Eleusis and Thria and laid the country waste, under the leadership of Pleistoanax son of Pausanias, king of the Lacedaemonians; then, without advancing any farther, they went home. And the Athenians crossed over to Euboea again under Pericles and subdued the whole island. The rest of it they settled by agreement; but they drove out the Hestiaeans and took their land for themselves.

115 Not long after their return from Euboea they made a treaty for thirty years with the Lacedaemonians and their allies,3 giving back Nisaea, Pegae, Troezen, and Achaea; for these were the places in the Peloponnese that the Athenians held. In the sixth year a war broke out between the Samians and the Milesians over Priene, and the Milesians, getting the worse of the war, came to Athens and loudly denounced the Samians. They were supported by certain private men from Samos itself who wanted to overthrow the constitution. So the Athenians sailed to Samos with forty ships and set up a democracy; they took from the Samians fifty boys and as many men as hostages, lodged them on Lemnos, left a garrison behind, and went home. But there were some Samians who had not stayed on the island but had 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 collected about seven hundred mercenaries, and crossed over to Samos by night. First they rose against the popular party and got most of its members into their hands; then they stole their own hostages away from Lemnos and revolted, handed over to Pissuthnes the Athenian garrison and the Athenian officials who were on the island, and at once prepared to march against Miletus. The Byzantines also revolted with them.

116 When the Athenians learned of this, they sailed against Samos with sixty ships. They did not use sixteen of them, for some had gone toward Caria to watch for the Phoenician fleet, and others to Chios and Lesbos to summon help; but with forty-four ships, under the command of Pericles and nine other generals, they fought a sea battle off the island of Tragia against seventy Samian ships, twenty of them troop transports (the whole fleet happened to be sailing back from Miletus), and the Athenians won. Later they were reinforced by forty ships from Athens and twenty-five from Chios and Lesbos. They landed, and since they were superior on land, they besieged the city with three walls, and from the sea at the same time. Pericles took sixty of the blockading ships and went off in haste toward Caunus and Caria, on a report that Phoenician ships were sailing against them; for Stesagoras and others had also left Samos with five ships to go against the Phoenicians.

117 Meanwhile the Samians made a sudden sortie, fell on the unfortified camp, destroyed the guard ships, and defeated in battle the ships that put out against them. For about fourteen days they were masters of the sea off their own coast, and brought in and carried out whatever they wished. But when Pericles returned, they were again shut in by the fleet. Later further reinforcements came from Athens: forty ships with Thucydides,4 Hagnon, and Phormio, and twenty with Tlepolemus and Anticles, and thirty from Chios and Lesbos. The Samians fought a brief battle at sea, but they were unable to hold out, and in the ninth month they were reduced by siege and surrendered on terms. They pulled down their wall, gave hostages, handed over their ships, and agreed to repay the cost of the war in installments. The Byzantines, too, agreed to be subjects as before.

118 It was after this, and not many years later, that the events already described took place: the affair of Corcyra, the affair of Potidaea, and everything that became a pretext for this war. All these actions of the Hellenes against one another and against the barbarian took place in a period of about fifty years, between the retreat of Xerxes and the beginning of this war. In those years the Athenians made their empire more secure and themselves advanced to great power. The Lacedaemonians saw it, but did not try to stop it, except for brief moments, and stayed quiet most of the time; they had always been slow to go to war unless they were forced to, and they were partly held back as well by wars at home; until at last the power of the Athenians was plainly rising and they had begun to lay hands on the Lacedaemonians’ own alliance. Then the Lacedaemonians found it no longer tolerable; they decided that they must set to work with all their energy and destroy that strength, if they could, by undertaking this war. The Lacedaemonians themselves had already decided that the treaty had been broken and that the Athenians were in the 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 made war with all their strength they would be victorious, and that he himself would help them, whether called upon or not.

119 They summoned their allies once more, intending to put to them the vote whether they should go to war. The envoys came from the alliance and a congress was held, and the others said what they wished, most of them accusing the Athenians and demanding that the war take place. The Corinthians had already gone to each of the cities separately and begged them to vote for the war, for they feared for Potidaea and that it would be lost before help came. They were present on this occasion too, and coming forward last, they spoke as follows.

120 “Allies, we can no longer find fault with the Lacedaemonians for not having voted for the war themselves, or for not having brought us together now for this purpose. For leaders, while they treat their own interests on an equal footing with the rest, must look ahead on behalf of the common interest, just as in other ways they are honored above all. Those of us who have already had dealings with the Athenians need no lesson in being on guard against them. But those who live farther inland and away from the routes of trade must understand that if they do not help the people of the coast, they will find it harder to bring their seasonal produce down to the sea and to take in exchange what the sea gives to the land. They must not be poor judges of what is being said here, as though it did not concern them; they must expect that if they abandon the coast, the danger will one day reach them too, and that they are deliberating now about themselves no less than about us. That is why they should not hesitate to exchange peace for war. It is the part of prudent men to keep quiet if they are not wronged; but it is the part of brave men, when they are wronged, to go from peace to war, and when the chance offers, to come to terms again after war; to be neither elated by success in war, nor, from delight in the quiet of peace, to submit to wrong. For the man who hesitates for the sake of his pleasure would very soon, if he kept quiet, be stripped of the very comfort for whose sake he hesitates; and the man who presses too far on a success in war has not reflected that he is carried away by a confidence that cannot be trusted. Many plans badly made have succeeded because the enemy proved still more ill-advised; and even more that seemed well made have ended, on the contrary, in disgrace. For no one carries a plan out in action with the same confidence with which he conceives it: we form our opinions in safety, and in action we fall short through fear.

121 “We, for our part, are now raising this war because we have been wronged and have grievances enough; and once we have punished the Athenians, we shall put an end to it in good time. There are many reasons why we are likely to prevail. First, we are superior in numbers and in military experience; second, we all alike obey orders. As for a navy, in which they are strong, we shall equip one from the resources each of us already has and from the money at Delphi and Olympia. By taking a loan we can lure away their foreign seamen with higher pay; for the power of the Athenians is bought rather than their own. Ours would be less exposed to this, since its strength lies in men rather than in money. With a single victory at sea they will in all likelihood be beaten; and if they hold out, we too shall have more time to train ourselves at sea, and once we have brought our skill up to the level of theirs, we shall surely be their superiors in courage. For the excellence we have by nature they could never acquire by instruction; and the advantage they have in skill we can wipe out by practice. As for the money needed for all this, we shall contribute it. It would be monstrous if their allies never refuse to pay for their own enslavement, while we will not spend money to take vengeance on our enemies and to save ourselves as well, and to keep that very money from being taken from us by them and used against us.

122 “We have other ways of making war too: we can bring about the revolt of their allies, which is the best way of cutting off the revenues on which their strength depends; we can establish a fortified post in their country; and there are other measures no one could foresee now. For war, least of all things, proceeds on fixed terms; it mostly devises its own means as occasions arise. The man who deals with it calmly stands more securely; the man who loses his temper over it comes to grief all the more. Let us consider this too: if each of us had a quarrel about boundaries with an opponent of equal strength, it could be borne; but as it is, the Athenians are a match for all of us together, and still more powerful than any one city; so that unless we resist them in a body, every nation and every city with one mind, they will find us divided and master us without effort. And defeat, terrible as it may be to hear, let everyone know, brings nothing else than outright slavery. It is shameful for the Peloponnese even to mention such a thing as a possibility, or that so many cities should suffer at the hands of one. If it came to that, it would seem either that we suffered justly or that we put up with it out of cowardice and proved worse men than our fathers, who freed Hellas; while we do not even secure this freedom for ourselves, but allow a city to be set up as a tyrant, though we think it right to put down sole rulers in single cities. We do not know how such conduct can be acquitted of the three greatest faults, stupidity, softness, or negligence. For you have certainly not escaped them by going over to that contempt for the enemy which has done harm to more men than anything else, and which, because it trips up so many, has had its name changed to its opposite, senselessness.

123 “But why should we find fault with the past at more length than serves the present? For the sake of the future, we must come to the aid of the present by toiling still harder, for it is your ancestral custom to win excellence through hardship. You must not change that custom, even if you are now a little ahead in wealth and resources, since it is not right that what was won in poverty should be lost in plenty. You must go to war with confidence, for many reasons: the god has given his oracle and promised to help you himself, and all the rest of Hellas will join you in the struggle, some from fear and some for their own advantage. Nor will you be the first to break the treaty: the god himself, in bidding you go to war, holds that it has been violated. Rather, you will be coming to the aid of a treaty that has been wronged; for it is not those who defend themselves who break a treaty, but those who attack first.

124 “So, since you have every good reason to go to war, and since we give this advice in common, if it is true that identity of interest is the surest bond, for cities as for individuals, do not delay to bring help to the Potidaeans, who are Dorians and are being besieged by Ionians, the reverse of what used to happen, and to recover the freedom of the rest. We can no longer wait, when some are already being harmed, and others, if it becomes known that we met but did not dare to defend ourselves, will soon suffer the same. Recognize, allies, that we have come to the point of necessity, and that this is at the same time the best advice; vote for the war, not afraid of the immediate danger, but desiring the more lasting peace that will come from it. For peace is made more secure by war, but to refuse to go to war out of love of quiet is not equally free from danger. Consider that the city that has been set up as a tyrant in Hellas has been set up against all of us alike, ruling some already and intending to rule the rest. Let us go against it and bring it to submission, so that we ourselves may live in safety in the future and free the Hellenes who are now enslaved.” Such was the speech of the Corinthians.

125 When the Lacedaemonians had heard the opinions of all, they put the vote to all the allies who were present, one after another, great city and small alike, and the majority voted for war. Though the decision had been made, it was impossible for them to set to work at once, since they were unprepared; but it was resolved that each should provide what was needed, and that there should be no delay. Even so, while they were making the necessary arrangements, a full year did not pass, but something less, before they invaded Attica and openly began the war.

126 During this time they sent embassies to the Athenians with complaints, so as to have the strongest possible pretext for going to war if the Athenians paid no attention. First the Lacedaemonians sent envoys and told the Athenians to drive out the curse of the goddess.5 The curse was this. There was an Athenian named Cylon, a victor at Olympia, a man of old family and of great influence, who had married the daughter of Theagenes, a Megarian, who at that time was tyrant of Megara. When Cylon consulted the oracle at Delphi, the god answered that he should seize the Acropolis of Athens at the greatest festival of Zeus. He got troops from Theagenes, persuaded his friends to join him, and when the Olympic festival in the Peloponnese came round, he seized the Acropolis in order to make himself tyrant, thinking that this was the greatest festival of Zeus and that it had some special bearing on himself as an Olympic victor. Whether the greatest festival meant was in Attica or somewhere else, he did not stop to consider, and the oracle did not make it plain. (For the Athenians too have a festival, the Diasia, which is called the greatest festival of Zeus Meilichius; it is held outside the city, and the whole people offer many sacrifices at it, not animal victims but bloodless offerings of the local kind.) Believing that he had understood correctly, he made the attempt. When the Athenians learned of it, they came in from the fields in full force against them, sat down before the Acropolis, and besieged it. As time went on, the Athenians grew weary of the blockade, and most of them went away, leaving the guard to the nine archons with full power to settle everything as they judged best; for in those days the nine archons conducted most of the business of the state. Cylon and those with him, under siege, were in a bad way for lack of food and water. Cylon and his brother escaped; but the rest, as they were hard pressed and some were even dying of hunger, sat down as suppliants at the altar on the Acropolis. Those of the Athenians who had been charged with the guard, seeing them dying in the sanctuary, raised them up, promising to do them no harm, led them away, and killed them. Some who had sat down at the altars of the Dread Goddesses as they passed were also put to death there. From this those men and their descendants were called accursed and offenders against the goddess. The Athenians drove out these accursed men, and later Cleomenes the Lacedaemonian also drove them out, with the help of an Athenian faction; they drove out the living, and dug up the bones of the dead and cast them out. They came back afterward, however, and their family is still in the city.

127 This, then, was the curse the Lacedaemonians told the Athenians to drive out, ostensibly to avenge the honor of the gods first of all. But they knew that Pericles son of Xanthippus was connected with it through his mother, and they thought that if he were banished, things would go more easily for them with the Athenians. They did not so much expect that he would actually suffer this as that it would bring him into discredit with his city, as though the war would be partly due to the taint upon him. For he was the most powerful man of his time and the leader of the state, and he opposed the Lacedaemonians in everything; he would not let the Athenians give way, but kept urging them on to war.

128 The Athenians in return told the Lacedaemonians to drive out the curse of Taenarum. For the Lacedaemonians had once raised up some Helot suppliants from the temple of Poseidon at Taenarum, led them away, and killed them; and they themselves believe that this was the cause of the great earthquake at Sparta. The Athenians also told them to drive out the curse of the goddess of the Bronze House.6 It came about as follows. After Pausanias the Lacedaemonian had been recalled the first time by the Spartiates from his command in the Hellespont, and had been tried by them and acquitted of wrongdoing, he was not sent out again in any public capacity. But he took a trireme from Hermione on his own account, without the authority of the Lacedaemonians, and arrived at the Hellespont, in word to take part in the Hellenic war, but in fact to carry on his dealings with the King, as he had first attempted before, with the aim of ruling over Hellas. He had begun by doing the King a service, and so made a start on the whole enterprise, in this way. When he took Byzantium on his earlier visit, after the return from Cyprus (it was held by the Medes, and some relatives and kinsmen of the King had been captured there), he sent back to the King the prisoners he had taken, without the knowledge of the other allies, and gave out that they had escaped from him. He arranged this with Gongylus of Eretria, to whom he had entrusted Byzantium and the prisoners. He also sent Gongylus to carry a letter to the King, in which, as was later discovered, the following was written: “Pausanias, the commander of Sparta, wishing to do you a favor, sends you back these men, whom he took with the spear. And I propose, if you agree, to marry your daughter and to bring Sparta and the rest of Hellas under your rule. I believe I am able to do this with you as my partner in counsel. If any of this pleases you, send a trustworthy man down to the sea, through whom we shall communicate from now on.”

129 That was all the letter disclosed. Xerxes was pleased with it, and he sent Artabazus son of Pharnaces down to the sea, ordering him to take over the satrapy of Dascylium, removing Megabates, who had governed it before. He gave him a letter in reply, to send across to Pausanias at Byzantium as quickly as possible, showing him the royal seal; and if Pausanias gave him any instructions about his own affairs, he was to carry them out as well and as faithfully as he could. Artabazus arrived, did everything else as he had been told, and sent the letter across. The reply read as follows: “Thus says King Xerxes to Pausanias. For the men whom you saved for me from Byzantium across the sea, a benefaction is laid up for you in our house, recorded forever; and I am pleased with your words. Let neither night nor day hold you back from pressing on with anything you promise me; let neither the cost in gold and silver nor the number of troops, if they are needed anywhere, stand in your way. With Artabazus, a good man whom I have sent to you, act boldly in my affairs and in yours, so that they may turn out most honorably and best for us both.”

130 On receiving this letter, Pausanias, who had already been held in great esteem by the Hellenes because of his command at Plataea, grew far more elated than before and could no longer live in the established way. He would go out from Byzantium dressed in Median clothes; when he traveled through Thrace, Medes and Egyptians served as his bodyguard; he had a Persian table set for him; and he could not keep his purpose to himself, but showed by small acts what he meant to do on a larger scale later on. He made himself hard to approach, and treated everyone alike with a temper so harsh that no one could come near him. This was not the least of the reasons why the alliance went over to the Athenians.

131 It was for these very reasons that the Lacedaemonians, when they learned of them, had recalled him the first time. And now he had sailed out a second time in the ship from Hermione without their orders and was evidently behaving in the same way; he had been forced out of Byzantium by the Athenians in a siege, and instead of returning to Sparta he had settled at Colonae in the Troad, and reports came to them that he was intriguing with the barbarians and that his stay there was for no good purpose. So at last they waited no longer. The ephors sent a herald with a scytale, the staff on which they wrote their dispatches, and told him to come back with the herald, or else the Spartiates declared war on him. Wishing to be as little suspected as possible, and confident that he could clear himself of the charge with money, he returned to Sparta a second time. At first he was thrown into prison by the ephors (the ephors have the power to do this to the king); afterward he arranged matters and got out, and offered to stand trial before anyone who wished to bring proof against him.

132 The Spartiates had no clear evidence, neither his enemies nor the city as a whole, on which they could rely with confidence in punishing a man of the royal house who held high honor at the time; for he was the cousin of Pleistarchus son of Leonidas, who was king and still a minor, and was acting as his regent. But by his disregard of the laws and his imitation of the barbarians he gave much cause for suspicion that he was not content to stay within the bounds of his present position. They went over the rest of his conduct, to see whether he had anywhere departed from the established customs, and they recalled that he had once taken it upon himself to have the following couplet inscribed in his own name on the tripod at Delphi, which the Hellenes had dedicated as first fruits from the spoils of the Medes: “Leader of the Hellenes, when he destroyed the army of the Medes, / Pausanias set up this memorial to Phoebus.” The Lacedaemonians had at once chiseled this couplet off the tripod and inscribed on it the names of all the cities that had joined in overthrowing the barbarian and had set up the offering. Still, even at the time this was thought to be a crime on Pausanias’s part, and now that he had come under suspicion, it seemed all the more to be of a piece with his present designs. They learned, too, that he was intriguing with the Helots; and so he was. He promised them freedom and citizenship if they would rise with him and help him carry the whole plan through. But even so they would not trust certain Helots who informed against him, nor think fit to take any drastic step against him. In this they kept to their usual practice toward their own people: not to be hasty in deciding anything irreparable against a Spartiate without indisputable proof. At last, it is said, the man who was to carry to Artabazus the last letters for the King, a man of Argilus, who had once been Pausanias’s lover and was most trusted by him, turned informer. 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 if he proved mistaken in his suspicion, or if Pausanias asked for the letters back to change something, he would not discover it, and opened the letters. Suspecting that some instruction of this kind had been added, he found it written there that he himself was to be killed.

133 Then, when he showed them the letters, the ephors were more inclined to believe; but they wanted to hear something from Pausanias’s own mouth as well. By arrangement, the man went to Taenarum as a suppliant and built a hut divided in two by a partition, in which he hid some of the ephors; and when Pausanias came to him and asked the reason for his supplication, they heard everything clearly. The man reproached him with what had been written about himself and set out the rest point by point: he had never once put Pausanias at risk in his errands to the King, and yet he had been granted the same honor as the mass of servants, to be put to death. Pausanias admitted these very things and told him not to be angry about what had happened; he gave him a pledge of safety if he would leave the sanctuary, and asked him to set out as quickly as possible and not hinder what was being done.

134 Having heard it all exactly, the ephors went away for the time being; and 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 up and knew why he was coming; and when another, out of goodwill, gave him a covert nod to warn him, he ran to the precinct of the goddess of the Bronze House and took refuge there ahead of them, for the sacred ground was close by. He went into a small building that belonged to the temple, so as not to suffer in the open air, and kept quiet there. For the moment his pursuers were too late; but afterward they took the roof off the building, and watching until he was inside, shut him in and walled up the doors. Then they sat down before it and starved him out. When he was about to die, there in the building, they saw it and carried him out of the temple while he was still breathing; and as soon as he was outside he died. They meant to throw him into the Caeadas, where they throw criminals, but then decided to bury him somewhere nearby. Later, however, the god at Delphi ordered the Lacedaemonians to move his tomb to the place where he died (he now lies in the entrance to the precinct, as inscribed stelae show), and, since what they had done was a curse upon them, to 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 though in place of Pausanias.

135 Since the god himself had judged it a curse, the Athenians told the Lacedaemonians in return to drive it out. The Lacedaemonians sent envoys to the Athenians and accused Themistocles of having shared in the Medism of Pausanias, as they found from the evidence brought against Pausanias, and they demanded that he be punished in the same way. The Athenians agreed (he happened to have been ostracized,7 and was living at Argos and traveling about the rest of the Peloponnese as well), and they sent, together with the Lacedaemonians, who were ready to join in the pursuit, men with orders to bring him back wherever they found him.

136 But Themistocles learned of it in advance and fled from the Peloponnese to Corcyra, for he was a benefactor of the Corcyraeans. When the Corcyraeans said they were afraid to keep him, since it would make enemies of the Lacedaemonians and the Athenians, they had him taken across to the mainland opposite. Pursued by the men assigned to the task, who kept learning which way he was going, he was forced, at a loss what to do, to stop at the house of Admetus, king of the Molossians, who was no friend of his. Admetus happened to be away from home; Themistocles became a suppliant of his wife, and she told him to take their child and sit down at the hearth. When Admetus came back not long after, Themistocles told him who he was, and asked him not to take vengeance on an exile, even if he himself had once opposed some request Admetus had made of the Athenians. For now, he said, he might suffer harm at Admetus’s hands, being far the weaker, and it was noble to take vengeance only on equals and on equal terms. Besides, he had opposed Admetus over some matter of business, not of life and death; whereas Admetus, if he handed him over (and he told him by whom and for what reason he was being pursued), would deprive him of the means of saving his life.

137 When Admetus heard this, he raised Themistocles up, together with his own son, just as Themistocles had been sitting holding him; and this was the most solemn form of supplication. Not long after, when the Lacedaemonians and the Athenians came and said a great deal, he would not hand him over; and since Themistocles wished to go to the King, he sent him overland to the other sea, to Pydna, which belonged to Alexander. There he found a merchant ship putting out for Ionia and went aboard, and he was carried by a storm to the Athenian fleet that was besieging Naxos. He was afraid, and since he was unknown to those on board, he told the shipmaster who he was and why he was in flight; and he said that unless the shipmaster saved him, he would say that he had been bribed to carry him. Their safety, he said, lay in no one leaving the ship until they could sail on; and if the shipmaster did as he asked, he would repay the favor as it deserved. The shipmaster did so, and after riding at anchor for a day and a night off the fleet, he eventually reached Ephesus. Themistocles rewarded him with a gift of money (for funds reached him later from his friends at Athens and from Argos, where he had money deposited), and traveling inland with one of the Persians of the coast, he sent a letter 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 Hellenes I did your house the most harm, for as long as I was compelled to defend myself against your father’s attack; but I did it still more good, when his retreat was under way, at a time when I was in safety and he was in danger. And a service is owed me” (here he wrote of the warning he had sent from Salamis about the retreat, and of how, thanks to him, the bridges had not been broken down, a claim that was false), “and now I am here, able to do you great service, pursued by the Hellenes because of my friendship for you. I wish to wait a year and then explain to you myself why I have come.”

138 The King, it is said, admired his purpose and told him to do as he proposed. In the time he waited, he learned as much as he could of the Persian language and of the customs of the country. When he arrived after the year, he became a great man at the court, greater than any Hellene had ever been, because of his earlier reputation and the hope he held out to the King of enslaving the Hellenic world, but above all because he gave proof of his intelligence. For Themistocles was a man who showed beyond any doubt the strength of natural ability, and in this respect he deserved admiration in an exceptional degree, more than any other. By his own native intelligence, without studying anything to prepare for it beforehand or learning anything to supplement it afterward, he was the best judge of a present situation with the least deliberation, and the best at forecasting what was to come, furthest into the future. What he had in hand he was able to explain; what lay outside his experience he was still able to judge adequately; and he could foresee, better than anyone, the better or the worse course while it was still hidden. To sum it up: by the power of his nature and with very little study, this man was the very best at improvising what had to be done. He died of an illness; though some say that he took poison of his own accord, believing it impossible to accomplish what he had promised the King. There is a monument to him in the marketplace of Magnesia in Asia; for he governed that district, the King having given him Magnesia for his bread, which brought in fifty talents a year, Lampsacus for his wine (it was thought to be the richest wine country of the time), and Myus for the rest of his fare. His relatives say that his bones were brought home at his own request and buried in Attica without the knowledge of the Athenians; for it was not lawful to bury him there, as he had been exiled for treason. Such was the end of Pausanias the Lacedaemonian and Themistocles the Athenian, the most brilliant of the Hellenes of their time.

139 Such were the demands the Lacedaemonians made at their first embassy, and such the counterdemands made of them, about driving out the accursed. Later they kept coming to the Athenians, telling them to raise the siege of Potidaea and to leave Aegina autonomous; and above all, and most plainly of all, they declared that there would be no war if the Athenians revoked the decree about the Megarians, which barred them from the harbors in the Athenian empire and from the market of Attica. The Athenians would neither listen to them on the other points nor revoke the decree, and they charged the Megarians with cultivating the sacred land and the unmarked borderland, and with taking in runaway slaves. At last the final envoys arrived from Lacedaemon, Ramphias, Melesippus, and Agesander, and said nothing of what they had been in the habit of saying before, only this: “The Lacedaemonians want peace, and there will be peace if you leave the Hellenes autonomous.” The Athenians held an assembly and put the question up for debate among themselves; and they resolved to deliberate on everything once and for all and then give their answer. Many others came forward and spoke, on both sides, some saying that they must go to war, others that the decree should not stand in the way of peace, but should be revoked. Then Pericles son of Xanthippus came forward, at that time the first man in Athens and the most able in speech and in action, and gave the following advice.

140 “Athenians, I hold always to the same judgment: that we must not give way to the Peloponnesians. I know that men are not persuaded to go to war in the same temper in which they carry it on in action, but that their judgments shift with what befalls them. Still, I see that I must now give the same advice as before, or nearly the same; and I ask those of you who are persuaded to stand by what we resolve in common, even if we should meet with some setback, or else, if we succeed, not to claim any credit for wisdom. For the course of events can go as stupidly as the plans of men; which is why we are in the habit of blaming chance for whatever turns out contrary to our reckoning. The Lacedaemonians were plainly plotting against us before, and they are now more than ever. It was agreed that we should submit our differences to arbitration and accept its judgment, each side keeping what it has; yet they have never once asked for arbitration, nor do they accept it when we offer it. They want to settle their grievances by war rather than by words; and now they come no longer complaining, but already giving orders. They order us to raise the siege of Potidaea, to leave Aegina autonomous, and to revoke the Megarian decree; and these last envoys have come even proclaiming that we must leave the Hellenes autonomous. Let none of you think that we would be going to war over a trifle if we refuse to revoke the Megarian decree, which they put forward above everything, saying that if it were revoked there would be no war; and leave yourselves no ground for the self-reproach that you went to war over a small matter. For this trifle holds the whole confirmation and testing of your resolve. If you give way to them, you will at once be ordered to do something greater, since you will have obeyed in this out of fear; but by a firm refusal you would make it clear to them that they had better deal with you as equals.

141 “Make up your minds, then, here and now, either to submit before you come to any harm, or, if we go to war, as I for one think best, to do so resolved not to give way on any pretext, great or small, and not to hold what we possess in fear. For the greatest claim and the least have the same meaning, slavery, when they are imposed as commands on neighbors by their equals, before any judgment at law. As for the war and the resources of each side, listen to the particulars, and you will see that ours will not be the weaker. The Peloponnesians work their own land; they have no money, either private or public; and they have no experience of long wars or of wars overseas, because their poverty limits them to brief wars against one another. Men like these cannot often man fleets or send out armies by land, since they would have to be away from their own farms and to spend from their own means, and besides they are shut off from the sea. It is reserves of wealth, rather than forced contributions, that sustain wars. And men who work their own land are readier to make war with their bodies than with their money: their bodies, they are confident, may come through the dangers, but they have no assurance that their money will not run out first, especially if the war, as is likely, lasts longer than they expect. In a single battle the Peloponnesians and their allies are able to stand against all the Hellenes together; but they are unable to carry on a war against a power equipped unlike themselves. They have no single council chamber, so they cannot carry anything through promptly and with vigor; they all have an equal vote and are not of the same race, so each presses his own interest; and in this way nothing is usually accomplished. Some want above all to take vengeance on an enemy, others to lose as little as possible of their own. They are slow to assemble, and when they do, they give a small part of the time to some matter of common concern and the greater part to their own affairs. Each supposes that his own neglect will do no harm, and that it is someone else’s business to look ahead for him; so that by this same notion, held by each of them privately, the common cause is ruined all together without their noticing it.

142 “Most important of all, they will be hampered by lack of money, since they must provide it slowly and so will be delayed; and the opportunities of war do not wait. Nor are their fortified post or their navy worth fearing. As for the first, it is hard even in peacetime to build a city that could rival ours, still more in enemy country, and when we have fortified posts against them no less than they against us. If they build a mere fort, they might damage part of our land by raids and by giving refuge to deserters; but this will not be enough to prevent us from sailing to their country and fortifying posts there, and from retaliating with our ships, in which our strength lies. For we have more experience of fighting on land from our naval operations than they have of naval matters from their fighting on land. And skill at sea will not easily become theirs. Not even you, who have practiced it ever since the Median wars, have yet brought it to perfection; how then could farmers, not seamen, achieve anything of note, men who 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 the risk, emboldening their ignorance by their numbers; but held in check by many, they will keep still, and for want of practice they will be less skillful, and so all the more timid. Seamanship is a matter of skill, like anything else; it cannot be practiced whenever the chance offers, as a sideline, but rather nothing else can be a sideline to it.

143 “And if they should lay hands on the money at Olympia or Delphi and try to lure away our foreign seamen with higher pay, that would be serious if we were not a match for them by going on board ourselves, with our resident aliens. But as it is, we are; and, what matters most, our helmsmen are citizens, and the rest of our crews are more numerous and better than in all the rest of Hellas. Nor, with the danger in view, would any of the foreigners choose to be exiled from his own country and to fight on their side, with less hope of winning as well, for the sake of a few days of high pay. That, or something close to it, is how the position of the Peloponnesians appears to me. Ours, I think, is free of the defects I have found in theirs, and has other great advantages besides, out of all proportion to theirs. If they march against our country by land, we shall sail against theirs; and it will no longer be the same thing for part of the Peloponnese to be laid waste as for the whole of Attica. For they will have no other land to take in its place without fighting, while we have plenty of land both in the islands and on the mainland. The command of the sea is a great thing. Consider: if we were islanders, who would be harder to capture? As it is, we must think of ourselves as nearly as possible in that position: give up our land and our houses, and keep guard over the sea and the city. We must not, in our anger over these things, fight it out with the Peloponnesians, who are far more numerous (for if we win, we shall have to fight again against no fewer of them, and if we fail, we lose our allies as well, the source of our strength, since they will not keep quiet when we are no longer able to march against them); and we must lament the loss not of houses and land, but of lives. For it is not these things that win men, but men who win these things. And if I thought I could persuade you, I would tell you to go out and lay them waste yourselves, and show the Peloponnesians that you will not give in to them for the sake of these.

144 “I have many other reasons to hope that we shall prevail, if you are willing not to extend the empire while we are at war and not to take on dangers of your own choosing; for I am more afraid of our own mistakes than of the enemy’s designs. But that will be made clear in another speech, when the deeds themselves are at hand. For now, let us send these envoys back with this answer: as to the Megarians, that we will allow them to use our market and our harbors if the Lacedaemonians, too, stop their expulsions of foreigners, whether of us or of our allies (for the treaty forbids neither the one nor the other); as to the cities, that we will leave them autonomous if they were autonomous when we made the treaty, and when the Lacedaemonians, too, allow their own cities to be autonomous, not in the way that suits the Lacedaemonians, but as each of them wishes; and that we are willing to submit to arbitration according to the treaty, and will not begin a war, but will defend ourselves against those who do. This answer is both just and befitting this city. But you must understand that the war is a necessity; that the more willingly we accept it, the less hard we shall find our enemies pressing upon us; and that it is from the greatest dangers that the greatest honors come, both to a city and to a man. Our fathers, at any rate, stood up to the Medes, though they started from no such resources as ours, and even abandoned what they had; and by judgment more than by fortune, and by daring more than by power, they drove back the barbarian and brought our affairs to where they are now. We must not fall short of them, but must defend ourselves against our enemies in every way, and try to hand on to those who come after us no less than we received.”

145 Such was the speech of Pericles. The Athenians, believing that his advice was the best, voted as he urged, and answered the Lacedaemonians as he proposed, both on each point as he had stated it and on the whole: they would do nothing on command, but they were ready to settle the grievances by arbitration according to the treaty, on fair and equal terms. And the envoys went home and sent no further embassies.

146 These were the grievances and the differences between the two sides before the war, beginning immediately with the affairs at Epidamnus and Corcyra. Even so, they kept up their dealings with one another while these went on, and visited each other without heralds, though not without suspicion; for what was happening was a breaking of the treaty and a pretext for war.

Notes

  1. 1. Mycale, a promontory on the coast of Asia Minor opposite Samos, where the Hellenes destroyed the Persian fleet and army in 479 BC, the year of the battle of Plataea.

  2. 2. Hellanicus of Lesbos, a fifth-century BC writer of chronicles and local histories; his Attic History is lost.

  3. 3. The Thirty Years’ Peace, 446/5 BC.

  4. 4. Not the historian; the identity of this Thucydides is uncertain.

  5. 5. The goddess is Athena, at whose altar on the Acropolis the suppliants sat. Cylon’s attempt is usually dated to 632 BC. The family held accursed was the Alcmaeonidae, to which Pericles’ mother belonged (1.127).

  6. 6. Athena Chalcioecus, “of the Bronze House,” whose temple on the acropolis of Sparta was faced with bronze.

  7. 7. Ostracism: a vote by which the Athenians could send a citizen into exile for ten years without trial and without loss of property. Themistocles was ostracized about 471 BC.