Book 2

1 From this point begins the war between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians and the allies of each side. In it they no longer had dealings with one another except through heralds, and once they had gone to war they fought without a break. It has been written down in order, as each thing happened, by summers and winters.

2 For fourteen years the Thirty Years’ Peace, concluded after the capture of Euboea, held. In the fifteenth year, when Chrysis was in the forty-eighth year of her priesthood at Argos, Aenesias was ephor at Sparta, and Pythodorus had two months left as archon at Athens,¹ in the sixth month after the battle at Potidaea, and just at the beginning of spring, at about the hour of first sleep, a force of Thebans a little over three hundred strong, led by the Boeotarchs Pythangelus son of Phyleides and Diemporus son of Onetorides, made an armed entry into Plataea, a town in Boeotia allied with Athens. They had been called in, and the gates opened to them, by men of Plataea, Naucleides and his party, who wanted, for the sake of their own power, to destroy those of the citizens who opposed them and to bring the city over to Thebes. They managed this through Eurymachus son of Leontiades, a man of the greatest influence at Thebes. For the Thebans foresaw that the war was coming, and they wanted to seize Plataea, which had always been at odds with them, in advance, while there was still peace and the war had not yet openly broken out. This was also why they got in so easily without being noticed: no guard had been posted. They grounded their arms in the marketplace, but they would not do as the men who had called them in urged, and set to work at once and go to the houses of their enemies. Instead they resolved to issue conciliatory proclamations and to bring the city to an agreement and to friendship. (Their herald proclaimed that anyone who wished to be an ally according to the ancestral custom 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.

3 When the Plataeans realized that the Thebans were inside and that their city had been taken by surprise, they were terrified, and thinking that far more had come in than had (for they could not see in the dark), they came to terms, accepted the proposals, and kept quiet, all the more because the Thebans were doing no violence to anyone. But while they were negotiating they somehow became aware that the Thebans were not many, and they thought that if they attacked they could easily overpower them; for the mass of the Plataeans did not want to break away from the Athenians. So they decided the attempt must be made. They gathered together by digging through the party walls between their houses, so as not to be seen going through the streets; they set wagons without their draft animals across the streets to serve as a barricade; and they prepared everything else as each thing seemed likely to be useful in the circumstances. When they were as ready as they could be, they waited for the last of the night, the very hour before dawn, and moved out of their houses against them, so that they would not be attacking men made bolder by daylight and meeting them on equal terms, but men made more fearful by the dark, who would be no match for the Plataeans’ own knowledge of the town. They attacked at once and quickly came to close quarters.

4 When the Thebans saw that they had been deceived, they closed up among themselves and beat back the attacks wherever they fell. Two or three times they repulsed them. Then the Plataeans charged with a great uproar, while the women and the slaves on the housetops screamed and yelled and pelted them with stones and tiles, and heavy rain had come on during the night as well; at that the Thebans panicked, turned, and fled through the city. Most of them had no knowledge of the ways out by which they might escape, in the dark and the mud (for this happened at the end of the month), while their pursuers knew well how to keep them from escaping, so that most of them were killed. One of the Plataeans shut the gate by which they had come in, the only one that was open, by driving the butt spike of a javelin into the bar in place of a pin, so that there was no way out even there. Chased through the city, some of them climbed the wall and threw themselves down outside, and most of these were killed; others got out by a deserted gate, unseen, after a woman gave them an ax and they cut through the bar, but not many, for they were soon discovered; and others were killed scattered here and there about the city. The largest part, and those who had kept most closely together, rushed into a large building that formed part of the wall, whose doors happened to be open, thinking that its doors were a gate of the city and that there was a passage straight through to the outside. When the Plataeans saw them trapped, they debated whether to burn them as 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 alive and wandering about the city agreed to surrender themselves and their arms to the Plataeans, to be dealt with as they pleased. That was how matters had gone for those in Plataea.

5 The rest of the Thebans, who were to have arrived with their whole force while it was still night, in case things should not go well for those who had entered, were on their way when the news of what had happened reached them, and they hurried to help. Plataea is seventy stades from Thebes, and the rain that had fallen in the night made them slower in coming, for the river Asopus had risen high and was not easy to cross. Marching in the rain and getting across the river with difficulty, they arrived too late: of the men, some had already been killed and the rest were being held alive. When the Thebans learned what had happened, they planned to strike at the Plataeans outside the city, for there were people in the fields and property too, as was natural when trouble had come unexpectedly in time of peace; they wanted any they captured to be held as hostages for the men inside, if any of them had in fact been taken alive. That was what they intended. But the Plataeans, while the Thebans were still deliberating, suspected something of the kind and, fearing for those outside, sent a herald to the Thebans. They said that the Thebans had committed an impious act in trying to seize their city while the treaty was in force, and they told them not to harm what was outside; if they did, the Plataeans said, they would kill the men they held alive, but if the Thebans withdrew from their territory, they would give the men back to them. That is the Theban account, and they say the Plataeans swore to it. The Plataeans do not agree that they promised to give back the men at once, but only after talks had first been held, if they could reach some agreement, and they deny that they swore an oath. At any rate the Thebans withdrew from the territory without doing any harm; and the Plataeans, as soon as they had hastily brought in what they had in the countryside, killed the men at once. Those taken were one hundred and eighty, and Eurymachus, with whom the traitors had made their arrangement, was one of them.

6 When they had done this, they sent a messenger to Athens, gave back the dead to the Thebans under a truce, and settled affairs in the city as seemed best to them in the circumstances. The news of what had happened at Plataea was brought to the Athenians at once. They immediately arrested all the Boeotians who were in Attica and sent a herald to Plataea with orders to tell them to take no drastic step concerning the Theban men they held until the Athenians themselves had come to some decision about them; for they had not been told that the men were dead. The first messenger had left just as the Thebans were coming in, and the second just after they had been defeated and seized, and of what followed they knew nothing. So the Athenians sent their instructions in ignorance, and the herald arrived to find the men killed. After this the Athenians marched to Plataea, brought in grain, and left a garrison, and they took away the least useful of the people together with the women and children.

7 Now that the affair at Plataea had taken place and the treaty had been openly broken, the Athenians prepared for war, and so did the Lacedaemonians and their allies. Both sides intended to send embassies to the King and to the other barbarians elsewhere, wherever either hoped to get some help, and they were making alliances with the cities that lay outside their own sphere of power. The Lacedaemonians, in addition to the ships already on hand, ordered those in Italy and Sicily who had taken their side to build ships in proportion to the size of their cities, so that the total number would come to five hundred, and to get ready a fixed sum of money; in other respects they were to keep quiet and to receive Athenians only if they came in a single ship, until these preparations were complete. The Athenians reviewed their existing alliance and sent embassies above all to the places around the Peloponnese, Corcyra, Cephallenia, the Acarnanians, and Zacynthus, seeing that if these were securely friendly to them, they could wage war on the Peloponnese from all around it.

8 Neither side had small thoughts; both threw themselves into the war with all their strength, and not unnaturally. Everyone grips a thing more eagerly at the beginning, and at that time there was a great number of young men in the Peloponnese and a great number in Athens who, for lack of experience, took up the war gladly. All the rest of Hellas was in suspense as its leading cities came into collision. Many prophecies were being recited, and oracle-mongers were chanting many of them, both among those about to go to war and in the other cities. Besides this, Delos had been shaken by an earthquake a little before, though it had never been shaken before in the memory of the Hellenes; it was said, and believed, to be a sign of what was to come. If anything else of the kind happened to occur, it was all sought out. The goodwill of mankind leaned far more toward the Lacedaemonians, especially since they had proclaimed that they were freeing Hellas. Every individual and every city was eager to join in helping them, in word and deed, as far as they could, and each man felt that the cause was held back wherever he himself could not be present. So angry were most people with the Athenians, some wanting to be released from their empire, others afraid of coming under it.

9 Such were the preparations and the spirit with which they set out, and these were the cities each side had as allies when they entered the war. The allies of the Lacedaemonians were these. All the Peloponnesians within the Isthmus except the Argives and the Achaeans (these were on friendly terms with both sides; of the Achaeans the Pellenians alone joined in the war at first, but later all of them did); and outside the Peloponnese, the Megarians, Boeotians, Locrians, Phocians, Ambraciots, Leucadians, and Anactorians. Of these, the Corinthians, Megarians, Sicyonians, Pellenians, Eleans, Ambraciots, and Leucadians provided ships; the Boeotians, Phocians, and Locrians provided cavalry; the other cities provided infantry. That was the alliance of the Lacedaemonians. The allies of the Athenians were the Chians, Lesbians, Plataeans, the Messenians in Naupactus, most of the Acarnanians, the Corcyraeans, the Zacynthians, and other cities that paid tribute among the following peoples: coastal Caria, the Dorians who border on the Carians, Ionia, the Hellespont, the places on the Thracian coast, the islands that lie east of a line between the Peloponnese and Crete, and all the Cyclades except Melos and Thera. Of these, the Chians, Lesbians, and Corcyraeans provided ships; the rest provided infantry and money. Such was the alliance of each side and its preparation for the war.

10 Immediately after the events at Plataea, the Lacedaemonians sent word around the Peloponnese and the allied states outside it, telling the cities to prepare an army and the supplies appropriate for an expedition abroad, since they were going to invade Attica. When each was ready, they assembled at the Isthmus at the appointed time, two-thirds of the forces of every city. When the whole army had been gathered, Archidamus, the king of the Lacedaemonians, who was in command of this expedition, called together the generals of all the cities and the men of highest rank and greatest consequence, and addressed them as follows.

11 “Peloponnesians and allies, our fathers made many expeditions, both within the Peloponnese itself and outside it, and the older men among us are not without experience of war. Yet we have never before set out with a greater force than this. And now we are marching against a city of the greatest power, and we ourselves are marching in the greatest numbers and with our best men. It is right, then, that we should prove neither worse than our fathers nor beneath our own reputation. For all Hellas has been stirred by this enterprise and is watching it closely, and, out of hatred of the Athenians, wishes us well and hopes we will accomplish what we intend. So even if some think we are attacking in great numbers, and that it is quite certain the enemy will not come out to meet us in battle, we must not for that reason advance any less carefully prepared. The commander and the soldier of every city should always expect, as far as he himself is concerned, that he will come into some danger. The course of war is uncertain, attacks are mostly made on the spur of the moment and in anger, and often a smaller force, because it was afraid, has defended itself better against a larger one that was caught unprepared through contempt. In enemy country one should always march with confidence in one’s judgment but make one’s preparations in fear; in this way men will have the most courage for attacking their enemies and the most safety against being attacked. And we are not marching against a city so powerless to defend itself, but against one superbly prepared in every respect. So we must fully expect them to come out and fight, if they have not already started out before we are even there, then at least when they see us in their land, ravaging it and destroying their property. For all men are seized by anger when they suffer some unaccustomed injury before their very eyes and at that very moment, and those who use reason least act most from passion. The Athenians are likely to do this more than others, since they think themselves fit to rule others and are used to invading and ravaging their neighbors’ land rather than seeing their own ravaged. Remember, then, how great a city you are marching against, and how great a name you will win for your ancestors and for yourselves, for good or ill, from the outcome. Follow wherever you are led, putting good order and vigilance above everything, and taking up your orders promptly. For this is the finest thing and the safest: that a great number of men be seen to act under a single discipline.”

12 Having said this much and dismissed the meeting, Archidamus first sent Melesippus son of Diacritus, a Spartiate, to Athens, in case the Athenians might be more ready to give way now that they saw the Peloponnesians already on the march. But they did not admit him to the city or to the assembly, for a motion of Pericles had carried earlier that they should receive no herald or embassy once the Lacedaemonians had taken the field. So they sent him away without hearing him and ordered him to be outside their borders that same day; in future, if the Lacedaemonians wanted anything, they should go back to their own territory and then send envoys. They also sent escorts with Melesippus so that he should not talk with anyone. When he reached the border and was about to part from them, he said only this before he went on his way: “This day will be the beginning of great evils for the Hellenes.” When he came back to the camp and Archidamus understood that the Athenians would not yet give way at all, he finally broke camp and advanced with his army into their land. The Boeotians provided their contingent and their cavalry to march with the Peloponnesians, and with the rest of their force they went to Plataea and ravaged its land.

13 While the Peloponnesians were still gathering at the Isthmus and were on their way, before they invaded Attica, Pericles son of Xanthippus, who was one of the ten generals of the Athenians, understood that the invasion was going to take place. Archidamus happened to be his guest-friend, and Pericles suspected that he might well pass over his estates and not ravage them, either because he himself wished to do Pericles a personal favor, or on the instructions of the Lacedaemonians, to bring suspicion on him, just as they had demanded the expulsion of the curse for his sake.² So he announced to the Athenians in the assembly that Archidamus was indeed his guest-friend, but that this friendship would not work to the city’s harm; if the enemy did not ravage his lands and houses as they did those of others, he would give them up to be public property, so that no suspicion should fall on him on that account. He also advised them about the present situation as he had before: they should prepare for the war and bring in their property from the fields; they should not go out to battle, but come into the city and guard it; they should fit out the fleet, in which their strength lay; and they should keep a firm hand on the allies. Their strength, he said, came from the money these allies paid in, and most victories in war were 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 from the allies every year, not counting its other revenue, and there were still at that time six thousand talents of coined silver on the Acropolis. (The greatest amount there had ever been was ten thousand talents less three hundred, from which money had been spent on the Propylaea of the Acropolis, on the other buildings, and on Potidaea.) Besides this there was uncoined gold and silver in private and public offerings, all the sacred vessels used in the processions and the games, the spoils taken from the Medes, and anything else of that kind, worth no less than five hundred talents. He added the considerable sums in the other temples, which they could use, and if they were cut off from absolutely everything, even the gold plates that covered the goddess herself. He pointed out that the statue had forty talents’ weight of refined gold on it, and that it was all removable. But if they used it for their survival, he said, they must put back no less afterward. So he encouraged them about money. As for hoplites, they had thirteen thousand, not counting the sixteen thousand in the garrisons and along the battlements. For that was the number that stood guard at first whenever the enemy invaded, drawn from the oldest and the youngest citizens and from those of the resident aliens who were hoplites. The Phaleric wall ran thirty-five stades to the circuit wall 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 Piraeus ran forty stades, of which the outer wall was manned; and the whole circuit of Piraeus together with Munychia was sixty stades, half of it under guard. He showed that they had twelve hundred cavalry including mounted archers, sixteen hundred archers, and three hundred triremes fit for sea. These were the forces the Athenians had, in each category no fewer than these, when the Peloponnesian invasion was first about to take place and they were entering the war. Pericles also said other things, as he usually did, to show that they would prevail in the war.

14 The Athenians listened and were persuaded. They brought in from the countryside their children and wives and the rest of the household goods they used, even stripping the woodwork from the houses themselves; their sheep and draft animals they sent across to Euboea and the islands lying off the coast. The move was hard for them, because most of them had always been used to living in the country.

15 This had been true of the Athenians, more than of others, from very early times. Under Cecrops and the first kings down to Theseus, Attica had always been settled in separate towns, each with its own town hall and magistrates, and unless they were in some danger they did not come together to consult with the king, but each governed itself and made its own decisions. Some of them even made war at times, as the Eleusinians with Eumolpus did against Erechtheus. But when Theseus became king, a man who combined intelligence with power, he set the land in order in various ways, and in particular he abolished the council chambers and magistracies of the other towns and united them all into the present city, designating a single council chamber and town hall. Each continued to occupy his own land as before, but Theseus compelled them to have this one city, which, since all now belonged to it, became great and was handed down by Theseus to those who came after. From that time down to the present the Athenians have held a public festival in honor of the goddess, the Synoecia.³ Before this, what is now the Acropolis was the city, together with the area below it, facing mostly south. Here is the evidence. The temples of the other gods as well are on the Acropolis itself, and those outside it are situated mostly in 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 in the month of Anthesterion, as the Ionians descended from the Athenians still celebrate them even now. Other ancient temples are also located here. And the spring that is now called the Nine Spouts, since the tyrants gave it that form, but was called Callirhoe in the old days when the springs were open, was used by the people of that time for the most important purposes, because it was near; even now, from that ancient custom, its water is used before weddings and for other sacred rites. And because of the ancient settlement there, the Acropolis is still called “the city” by the Athenians to this day.

16 So the Athenians had long lived in independent settlements throughout the country, and even after they were united, most of them, both in early times and later down to this war, from habit still lived with their households in the country, where they had been born and had their homes. So they did not find it easy to move with their whole households, especially since they had only recently restored their establishments after the Persian Wars. They were distressed and took it hard to leave their houses and the temples that had always been theirs, ancestral since their old form of government, and to change their way of life; each man was leaving nothing less than his own city.

17 When they reached the city, a few had houses or found refuge with friends or relatives, but most of them settled in the empty parts of the city and in all the temples and shrines of heroes, except the Acropolis, the Eleusinium, and any other place that could be securely locked. Even the so-called Pelargicum below the Acropolis, which was under a curse forbidding anyone to live there, and which the end of a Pythian oracle also forbade, saying, “Better the Pelargicum unused,” was nevertheless occupied under the pressure of immediate necessity. And it seems to me that the oracle came true in the opposite way from what they expected. The disasters did not befall the city because of the unlawful occupation; rather, the necessity of the occupation arose from the war, and the oracle, without naming the war, foreknew that the place would never be settled for any good. Many also set themselves up in the towers of the walls, and wherever each could; for the city did not have room for them all when they had come in. Later they divided up and occupied the space between the Long Walls and most of Piraeus. At the same time they took up the business of war, gathering allies and fitting out an expedition of a hundred ships against the Peloponnese. That was the stage of their preparations.

18 The army of the Peloponnesians, advancing, came first to Oenoe in Attica, where they intended to invade. Encamped there, they prepared to assault the wall with siege engines and by other means. For Oenoe, lying on the border of Attica and Boeotia, had been fortified, and the Athenians used it as a fort whenever war broke out. So they made ready their assaults and wasted time around it in other ways as well. Archidamus incurred no small blame for this. He was thought to have been soft in the gathering of the war, too, and well disposed to the Athenians, since he had not urged war wholeheartedly. Then, once the army was being assembled, the delay at the Isthmus and the slowness on the rest of the march had brought him into discredit, and most of all the halt at Oenoe. For the Athenians were bringing their property in during this time, and the Peloponnesians believed that if they had advanced quickly, they would have caught everything still outside, had it not been for his delay. Such was the anger the army felt toward Archidamus while it sat there. But he held back, it is said, because he expected the Athenians to give way somewhat while their land was still untouched, and to shrink from seeing it laid waste.

19 When, however, they had assaulted 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 had happened at Plataea, in midsummer, when the grain was ripe, and invaded Attica. Archidamus son of Zeuxidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians, was in command. 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 Aegaleus on their right, until they reached Acharnae, the largest of the places in Attica called demes. They encamped there, made it their base, and stayed a long time ravaging.

20 It is said that Archidamus had the following purpose in staying at Acharnae in battle order and not coming down into the plain on that invasion. He hoped that the Athenians, who were 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 stand by and see their land laid waste. So when they did not come out to meet him at Eleusis and the Thriasian plain, he made a trial, encamped at Acharnae, to see if they would come out. The place seemed to him suitable for a camp, and he also thought that the Acharnians, who were a large part of the city (they furnished three thousand hoplites), would not stand by and see their property destroyed, but would rouse all the rest to battle as well. And if the Athenians did not come out against him on that invasion, he could then ravage the plain with less fear in future and advance up to the city itself. For the Acharnians, once deprived of their own property, would not be equally eager to run risks for the land of others, and there would be dissension in their counsels. Such was Archidamus’ intention at Acharnae.

21 As long as the army was around Eleusis and the Thriasian plain, the Athenians still had some hope that it would not come any closer. They remembered that Pleistoanax son of Pausanias, king of the Lacedaemonians, had invaded Attica with a Peloponnesian army as far as Eleusis and Thria, fourteen years before this war, and had then gone back without advancing farther⁴ (which was in fact why he was banished from Sparta, since he was thought to have been bribed to withdraw). But when they saw the army at Acharnae, sixty stades from the city, they no longer found it bearable. Their land was being ravaged before their eyes, a thing the younger men had never seen, nor the older ones except in the Persian Wars, and naturally it seemed an outrage to them; everyone, and the young men above all, thought they should go out and not stand by and watch. They gathered in knots and argued fiercely, some demanding that they march out, some refusing to allow it. Oracle-mongers chanted oracles of every kind, and each man listened to them according to his own inclination. The Acharnians, who thought themselves no small part of the Athenians, pressed hardest for the sally, since it was their land that was being ravaged. The city was in every way inflamed. They were angry with Pericles, they remembered nothing of the advice he had given them before, and they abused him because, though he was their general, he would not lead them out; they held him responsible for everything they were suffering.

22 Pericles saw that they were angry at the moment and were not thinking at their best, and he was confident that he was right about not going out. So he did not call an assembly or any meeting of them, for fear that if they came together they would make some mistake out of anger rather than judgment. He kept the city guarded and as calm as he could. He did, however, keep sending out cavalry to stop raiding parties from the army from falling on the fields near the city and doing damage. There was a brief cavalry battle at Phrygia between one squadron of the Athenian cavalry, with the Thessalians, and the Boeotian cavalry. In it the Athenians and Thessalians held their own until hoplites came up to support the Boeotians; then they were routed, and a few of the Thessalians and Athenians were killed. They recovered their bodies, however, that same day without a truce, and 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 to them were the Larisaeans, Pharsalians, Crannonians, Pyrasians, Gyrtonians, and Pheraeans. Their leaders from Larisa were Polymedes and Aristonous, one from each faction, and from Pharsalus Meno; the others also had their own commanders, city by city.

23 When the Athenians did not come out to fight them, the Peloponnesians broke camp at Acharnae and ravaged some of the other demes between Mount Parnes and Mount Brilessus. While they were in the country, the Athenians sent off around the Peloponnese the hundred ships they had been preparing, with a thousand hoplites and four hundred archers on board, under the command of Carcinus son of Xenotimus, Proteas son of Epicles, and Socrates son of Antigenes. They set sail with this force and went around the Peloponnese. The Peloponnesians stayed in Attica as long as their provisions lasted and then withdrew through Boeotia, not by the way they had come in. Passing Oropus, they ravaged the land called Graea, which the Oropians, subjects of the Athenians, cultivate. When they reached the Peloponnese, they disbanded, each to his own city.

24 After they had withdrawn, the Athenians set up guards on land and sea, as they meant to keep guard throughout the whole war. They also decided to set aside a thousand talents of the money on the Acropolis as a special reserve, and not to spend it, but to carry on the war with the rest. If anyone proposed or put to the vote a motion to touch this money for any other purpose, except if the enemy should sail against the city with a fleet and they had to defend it, the penalty was to be death. Along with this money they set aside a hundred triremes each year, the best ones, with trierarchs for them, and none of these was to be used for any purpose except together with the money, for that same danger, if the need arose.

25 The Athenians in the hundred ships around the Peloponnese, together with the Corcyraeans, who had come to help with fifty ships, and some others of the allies in those parts, did damage at various places as they sailed around. They landed at Methone in Laconia and assaulted the wall, which was weak and had no men in it. But Brasidas son of Tellis, a Spartiate, happened to be in that district with a guard force, and when he learned of it, he went to the aid of those in the place with a hundred hoplites. He dashed through the Athenian army, which was scattered over the countryside and had its attention on the wall, burst into Methone, losing a few of his men in the dash, and saved the town. For this daring act he was the first in the war to be officially commended at Sparta. The Athenians set sail and went on along the coast. They put in at Pheia in Elis and ravaged the land for two days, and they defeated in battle three hundred picked men who came to the rescue from Hollow Elis and the Eleans of the surrounding district. A strong wind came down on them, and since they were being battered by the storm in a place without a harbor, most of them boarded the ships and sailed around the headland called Ichthys to the harbor at Pheia. Meanwhile the Messenians, and some others who could not get on board, went overland and took Pheia. Later the ships sailed around and picked them up, and they put to sea, abandoning Pheia, for the main army of the Eleans had now come up. The Athenians sailed on along the coast and ravaged other places.

26 About this same time the Athenians sent thirty ships around Locris, which were also to guard Euboea; Cleopompus son of Clinias was in command of them. He made landings and ravaged parts of the coast, took Thronium and received hostages from it, and at Alope defeated in battle the Locrians who came to its defense.

27 In this same summer the Athenians also expelled the Aeginetans from Aegina, men, children, and women, charging them with being not the least of the causes of the war. And it seemed safer to hold Aegina, which lies close to the Peloponnese, by sending settlers of their own. Not long afterward they sent the colonists there. The Lacedaemonians gave the exiled Aeginetans Thyrea to live in and its land to farm, both because of their quarrel with the Athenians and because the Aeginetans had been their benefactors at the time of the earthquake and the revolt of the Helots. The territory of Thyrea lies on the border between Argolis and Laconia and runs down to the sea. Some of them settled there; others were scattered through the rest of Hellas.

28 In the same summer, at the new moon (which seems to be the only time when this can happen), the sun was eclipsed after midday and became full again. It became crescent-shaped, and some stars appeared.⁵

29 In the same summer the Athenians made Nymphodorus son of Pytheas, a man from Abdera, their proxenus (a citizen who represents another city’s interests in his own). He had great influence with Sitalces, who was married to his sister, and the Athenians had previously regarded him as an enemy. They now summoned him because they wanted Sitalces son of Teres, king of the Thracians, to become their ally. This Teres, the father of Sitalces, was the first to establish the great kingdom of the Odrysians over the greater part of Thrace, for a large part of the Thracians is independent. This Teres has no connection with the Tereus who took Procne daughter of Pandion from Athens as his wife, nor did they come from the same Thrace. Tereus lived in Daulia, in what is now called Phocis, a land then inhabited by Thracians, and it was in this land that the women did the deed concerning Itys. (Many of the poets, when they mention the nightingale, call the bird “the Daulian.”) And it is likely that Pandion contracted his daughter’s marriage at that short distance, for mutual help, rather than at a distance of many days’ journey, to the Odrysians. Teres, who did not even have the same name, was the first king to rule the Odrysians in power. It was his son Sitalces whom the Athenians were making their ally, wanting him to help them subdue the places on the Thracian coast and Perdiccas. Nymphodorus came to Athens, concluded the alliance with Sitalces, and had Sitalces’ son Sadocus made an Athenian citizen; and he undertook to end the war on the Thracian coast, for he would persuade Sitalces to send the Athenians a Thracian army of cavalry and peltasts. He also reconciled Perdiccas with the Athenians and persuaded them to give Therme back to him. Perdiccas at once joined the Athenians and Phormio in 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.

30 The Athenians in the hundred ships, still in the waters around the Peloponnese, took Sollium, a small town belonging to the Corinthians, and handed it over to the Palaereans, alone of the Acarnanians, to occupy the land and the town. They also took by storm Astacus, where Evarchus was tyrant, drove him out, and brought the place into their alliance. They sailed to the island of Cephallenia and won it over without a battle. Cephallenia lies opposite Acarnania and Leucas and consists of four cities: the Paleans, Cranians, Samaeans, and Pronnaeans. Not long afterward the ships returned to Athens.

31 About the autumn of this summer the Athenians invaded the Megarid in full force, citizens and resident aliens, under the command of Pericles son of Xanthippus. The Athenians in the hundred ships around the Peloponnese, who happened to be already at Aegina on their way home, learned that the men from the city were at Megara in full force, and they sailed to join them. This was the largest Athenian army ever assembled in one body, for 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 no fewer than three thousand resident-alien hoplites joined in the invasion, besides a large crowd of light-armed troops. They ravaged most of the land and withdrew. Later in the war there were other invasions of the Megarid by the Athenians, every year, sometimes with cavalry, sometimes in full force, until Nisaea was taken by the Athenians.

32 At the end of this summer the Athenians also fortified Atalanta as a guard post, an island off the coast of Opuntian Locris that had been uninhabited before, to prevent pirates from sailing out of Opus and the rest of Locris and doing damage to Euboea. These were the events of this summer after the withdrawal of the Peloponnesians from Attica.

33 The following winter Evarchus the Acarnanian, wanting to return to Astacus, persuaded the Corinthians to sail with forty ships and fifteen hundred hoplites and restore him; he also hired some mercenaries himself. The commanders of the force were Euphamidas son of Aristonymus, Timoxenus son of Timocrates, and Eumachus son of Chrysis. They sailed and restored him. They wanted to win over some other places on the coast of Acarnania as well, and they tried, but when they could not, they sailed for home. Putting in on the way at Cephallenia, they made a landing in the territory of the Cranians. Deceived by them through some agreement, they lost some of their men when the Cranians attacked them unexpectedly, and after putting out to sea with some difficulty they made their way home.

34 In the same winter the Athenians, following their ancestral custom, held at public expense the funeral of those who had been the first to die in this war. They do it in the following way. Three days before the funeral they lay out the bones of the dead in a tent they have put up, and each person brings whatever offerings he wishes to his own dead. When the procession takes place, wagons carry coffins of cypress wood, one for each tribe, and the bones of each man are in the coffin of his tribe. One empty bier, spread with coverings, is carried for the missing, those whose bodies could not be found for recovery. Anyone who wishes, citizen or foreigner, joins the procession, and the women who are related to the dead are present at the grave, wailing. They lay them in the public tomb, which is in the most beautiful suburb of the city. There they always bury those who have died in the wars, except those who fell at Marathon; judging their courage to have been surpassing, they made their tomb on the spot. When they have covered them with earth, a man chosen by the city, one who is regarded as not lacking in judgment and stands foremost in public esteem, delivers over them the praise that is fitting; after this they depart. That is how they bury them, 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 came 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 he spoke as follows.

35 “Most of those who have spoken here before me have praised the man who added this speech to the custom, saying that it is a fine thing for it to be delivered over those who are buried from the wars. To me it would have seemed enough that men who proved brave in deed should also have their honors shown in deed, as you see them now in what the city has publicly prepared around this tomb, and that the courage of many should not be staked on one man, to be believed or not according to whether he speaks well or badly. For it is hard to speak in due measure on a subject where even the impression of truth is barely established. The listener who knows the facts and is well disposed will perhaps think that what is said falls short of what he wishes and knows, while the one who lacks that knowledge will think, out of envy, that some things are exaggerated, if he hears of anything beyond his own capacity. Praise spoken of others is bearable only so far as each listener thinks that he too could do something of what he hears; whatever goes beyond that rouses envy, and then disbelief. But since the men of old judged that this was a good practice, I too must follow the custom and try to meet, as far as I can, the wishes and expectations of each of you.

36 “I will begin first with our ancestors, for it is just, and fitting as well, that on such an occasion they should be given this honor of remembrance. The same people have always lived in this land, generation succeeding generation down to the present, and by their courage they handed it on to us free. They deserve praise, and our fathers still more. For in addition to what they inherited, they won, not without toil, all the empire we now hold, and left it to us who are alive today. Most of it we ourselves who are here now, those of us still in the settled years of life, have enlarged further, and we have made the city in every respect most self-sufficient for war and for peace. Of the deeds in war by which each of these possessions was gained, or of how we or our fathers eagerly beat back an enemy, barbarian or Hellene, who came against us, I will say nothing, since I do not wish to speak at length among people who know. But I will first show what way of life brought us to this, and with what form of government and from what habits of character our greatness arose, and then I will go on to the praise of these men. For I think it would not be unfitting to speak of these things on the present occasion, and that it is to the advantage of this whole gathering, citizens and foreigners alike, to hear them.

37 “We have a form of government that does not imitate the laws of our neighbors. We are rather a model to some than imitators of others. In name it is called a democracy, because it is run with a view not to the few but to the many. Under the laws, all have an equal share in settling their private disputes; but as for public standing, each man is preferred for public office according to how he is esteemed in some field, not by his turn in rotation so much as by merit. Nor is a man kept back by obscurity of rank because of poverty, if he has it in him to do the city some good. We conduct our public life freely, and so too our everyday dealings with one another, free of suspicion: we are not angry with our neighbor if he does as he pleases, nor do we put on the sour looks that do no actual harm but are painful to see. Easy as we are with one another in private, in public affairs it is above all fear that keeps us from breaking the law. We obey whoever is in office at the time, and the laws, especially those laid down to help the wronged, and those that, though unwritten, bring acknowledged shame on those who break them.

38 “And we have provided for the mind the most numerous relaxations from toil. We hold games and sacrifices throughout the year, and we have handsome private establishments whose daily delight drives away gloom. Because of the greatness of our city, the goods of every land flow in to us, and it is our lot to enjoy the good things of other men as much as our own, as if they were no less our own produce.

39 “We differ from our enemies in our training for war as well. We open our city to all, and we never expel foreigners to keep anyone from learning or seeing something, the sight of which, if it were not hidden, might benefit an enemy. For we trust less in preparations and deceptions than in our own spirit when it comes to action. In education, they pursue courage from early youth by painful discipline, while we live at our ease and yet go out no less ready to face dangers equal to theirs. Here is the evidence. The Lacedaemonians do not invade our land on their own, but with all their allies; while we, when we attack our neighbors’ land by ourselves, generally defeat without difficulty, on foreign soil, men who are defending their own homes. No enemy has ever yet met our full strength, because we attend to our navy at the same time as we send our own citizens out by land on many missions. Wherever they engage some fraction of us, if they defeat a few of us they boast that they have routed us all, and if they are beaten they claim to have been defeated by our entire force. And if we choose to meet danger with an easy mind rather than with laborious training, and with a courage that comes less from law than from character, we gain this: we do not suffer in advance for hardships still to come, and when we meet them we prove no less daring than those who are always toiling. In this our city is worthy of admiration, and in other things as well.

40 “For we love beauty without extravagance, and we love wisdom without softness. We use wealth as an opportunity for action rather than as a subject for boasting, and among us it is no disgrace for a man to admit poverty; the greater disgrace is not to act to escape it. The same men attend to their households and to public affairs, and others, though occupied with their trades, have no inadequate knowledge of public affairs. For we alone regard the man who takes no part in these things not as one who minds his own affairs, but as useless. We ourselves either decide or at least think through public matters properly, believing not that words harm action, but rather that harm comes from not being instructed by discussion before going into action as we must. For we have this too to a remarkable degree, that the same men both dare the most and reason out most fully what they undertake; with other men, ignorance brings boldness and reflection brings hesitation. Those would rightly be judged strongest in spirit who know most clearly what is terrible and what is pleasant, and are not turned aside from danger for all that. In matters of generosity, too, we are the opposite of most men, for we win our friends not by receiving favors but by conferring them. The one who confers a favor is the firmer friend, since he means to keep the gratitude owed him alive by continued goodwill toward the one he has given it to; the one who owes it in return is less warm, knowing that he will repay the kindness not as a favor but as a debt. And we alone help others without fear, not so much from a calculation of advantage as from confidence in our freedom.

41 “To sum up, I say that our city as a whole is the school of Hellas, and that each one of us, in my view, would show himself, as an individual, fit for the greatest variety of roles, and with the greatest grace and versatility. That this is not a boast of words made for the occasion, but the truth of the facts, is shown by the very power of the city, which we have won by these habits. Alone of the cities of our time, she proves greater than her reputation when put to the test. She alone gives no enemy who attacks her cause for indignation at the kind of men who defeat him, and no subject cause to complain that he is ruled by men unworthy of it. We have displayed our power with mighty proofs, and it is not without witnesses; we shall be admired by the men of today and by those who come after. 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 of the facts. We have forced every sea and every land to open itself to our daring, and everywhere we have planted, together with our colonies, everlasting memorials of harm done and good done. It was for such a city, then, that these men, nobly refusing to have her taken from them, fought and died, and it is fitting that every one of those left behind should be willing to labor for her.

42 “That is why I have spoken at length about the city, to teach you that the contest is not for equal stakes between us and those who have nothing of all this, and at the same time to make plain, with evidence, the praise of the men over whom I now speak. The greatest part of it has been spoken. For the qualities for which I have praised the city are the ornaments with which the courage of these men and men like them adorned her, and there are not many Hellenes whose fame would prove, as theirs does, equal to their deeds. It seems to me that the death these men have now met shows a man’s worth, whether as its first revelation or as its final confirmation. Even for those who were worse in other respects, it is right to put first their bravery in war on behalf of their country; for they have wiped out evil with good, and have done more good in public than harm in private. None of these men grew soft because he valued the further enjoyment of wealth more, and none, in the hope that belongs to poverty, that he might yet escape it and become rich, put off the danger. They desired vengeance on their enemies more than these things, and they thought this the most glorious of dangers, so they chose to take that vengeance at this risk and to let the rest go. They entrusted to hope the uncertainty of success, but in action, with regard to what was already before their eyes, they resolved to rely on themselves. And in that action they thought it better to resist and to suffer than to give way and be saved. So they fled the shameful word, but stood their ground in the deed with their bodies, and in the briefest moment of fortune, at the height not of their fear but of their glory, they passed away.

43 “So these men proved worthy of their city. The rest of you must pray for a safer outcome, but you must resolve to have a spirit toward the enemy no less daring. Do not judge the worth of such a spirit only from words, which someone might draw out at length, telling you, who know it as well as he does, of all the good there is in defending yourselves against the enemy. Rather, fix your eyes every day on the power of the city as it truly is, and become her lovers. And when she seems great to you, reflect that men acquired all this by daring, by knowing what had to be done, and by a sense of honor in action; and that whenever they failed in some attempt, they did not think it right to deprive the city of their courage, but offered it to her as the finest contribution they could make. For they gave their bodies in common and received, each for himself, the praise that never grows old, and the most distinguished of tombs, not so much the one in which they lie, but the one in which their glory is laid up, to be remembered forever, on every occasion for word or deed that arises. For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men. Not only does the inscription on monuments in their own land mark them, but even in foreign lands there lives in each person an unwritten memorial, of their spirit rather than of their deed. Make these men your models, then. Judge that happiness is freedom and freedom is courage, and do not look anxiously at the dangers of war. For it is not the unfortunate, who have no hope of good, who have the best reason to be unsparing of their lives, but those who still risk a reversal for the worse in life, and for whom the difference would be greatest if they should stumble. To a man of spirit, humiliation that comes with cowardice is more painful than a death that comes unfelt, in the midst of strength and shared hope.

44 “That is why I do not lament with the parents of these men, those of you who are here, so much as comfort them. They know that they were brought up amid the many turns of fortune. Fortunate are those who are allotted the most glorious end, as these men now, or the most glorious grief, as you, and those whose life has been measured out so that their happiness and their death came together. I know that it is hard to persuade you of this, since you will often be reminded of them by the good fortune of others, in which you too once took delight. And grief is felt not for good things one is deprived of without ever having tried them, but for something one has grown used to and has lost. Those of you who are still of an age to have children must bear up in the hope of other sons. In private, the children who are born will help some of you to forget those who are no more, and the city will gain doubly, in not being left empty and in its safety. For men cannot give fair and just counsel unless they too have children to stake in the danger on equal terms with others. As for those of you who are past that age, count as gain the greater part of your life in which you were fortunate, remember that what remains will be short, and take comfort in the glory of these men. For only the love of honor does not grow old, and in the uselessness of old age it is not making money, as some say, that gives more pleasure, but being honored.

45 “For you who are the sons or brothers of these men, I see a great struggle ahead (for everyone is accustomed to praise the dead), and even by surpassing excellence you would hardly be judged their equals, but only a little inferior. For the living feel envy toward a rival, but what no longer stands in the way is honored with a goodwill that has no competitor. If I must also say something about the excellence of women, to those of you who will now be widows, I will express it all in a brief piece of advice. Great is your glory if you do not fall below the nature that is yours, and great is hers who is least spoken of among men, whether in praise or in blame.

46 “I have said, in word and in accordance with the custom, what I had that was fitting; and in deed those being buried have already received part of their honors, while for the rest, the city will bring up their children at public expense from this day until they come of age. This is the useful crown she offers, to these men and to those left behind, for such contests. For where the greatest prizes for excellence are set, there the best men are citizens. And now, when each of you has finished lamenting his own, depart.”

47 Such was the funeral held in this winter; and with the end of the winter the first year of this war came to an end. At the very beginning of summer the Peloponnesians and their allies, with two-thirds of their forces as before, invaded Attica under the command of Archidamus son of Zeuxidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians, and encamped and ravaged the land. They had not yet been many days in Attica when the plague 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 a pestilence so great or of so great a destruction of human life. The doctors were of no help at first, treating it in ignorance; in fact they died most of all, since they came into contact with it most. Nor was any other human skill of any use. All the prayers they made at temples, and their recourse to oracles and the like, were all useless, and in the end they gave them up, overwhelmed by the disaster.

48 It began first, so it is said, in Ethiopia beyond Egypt, and then came down into Egypt and Libya and into most of the King’s land. It fell on the city of Athens suddenly, and first attacked the people in Piraeus, so that they even said the Peloponnesians had thrown poison into the cisterns; for there were no fountains there yet. Later it reached the upper city as well, and from then on the deaths were far more numerous. Let each man, doctor or layman, say what he thinks about it: from what source it probably arose, and what causes he believes were strong enough to produce so great a change. I will describe what it was like, and I will set out the symptoms from which anyone who studies them, if it should ever strike again, would best be able to recognize it, knowing something in advance. I had the disease myself, and I saw others suffering from it.

49 That year, as everyone agreed, happened to be more free of other illnesses than any other; and if anyone had some illness before, it all turned into this. Others, for no apparent cause, but suddenly, while they were in good health, were seized first by violent heat in the head and redness and inflammation of the eyes. Inside, the throat and the tongue at once became bloody, and the breath was strange and foul. Next came sneezing and hoarseness, and before long the pain went down into the chest, with a violent cough. When it settled in the stomach, it turned it upside down, and every discharge of bile that the doctors have named followed, accompanied by great distress. Most of them were then attacked by empty retching, which brought violent convulsions; in some these abated after the earlier symptoms, in others much later. To the touch the outside of the body was not very hot, nor pale, but reddish and livid, breaking out in small blisters and sores. But inside they burned so much that they could not bear to have on them even the lightest clothing or linen sheets, or anything but to be naked, and they would have liked best to throw themselves into cold water. Many of those who were left uncared for actually did so, plunging into cisterns, in the grip of a thirst that could not be quenched; and it made no difference whether they drank much or little. They were tormented all the while by restlessness and sleeplessness. 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 that most of them either died on the ninth or seventh day from the internal burning while they still had some strength, or, if they survived that, the disease descended into the bowels, severe ulceration set in there together with uncontrollable diarrhea, and most of them later died from the weakness this caused. For the disease, which first settled in the head, passed through the whole body from the top down, and if anyone survived the worst of it, its grip on the extremities still left its mark. It attacked the genitals and the tips of the hands and feet, and many survived with the loss of these, some also with the loss of their eyes. Others again, as soon as they recovered, were seized by a total loss of memory, and did not know themselves or their friends.

50 The nature of the disease was beyond description. In general it fell on each victim more cruelly than human nature can bear, and in one respect especially it showed that it was something other than the familiar illnesses. The birds and beasts that feed on human flesh, though many bodies lay unburied, either did not come near them or died after tasting them. Here is the evidence. There was a marked disappearance of birds of this kind, and they were not seen around the bodies or anywhere else. The dogs, because they live with people, made the effect easier to observe.

51 Such, then, was the disease in its general form, if one passes over many other peculiarities, since it happened to each person in a somewhat different way from another. At that time none of the usual illnesses troubled them; or whatever did occur ended in this. Some died from neglect, others despite every care. There was not one remedy, so to speak, that could be established as one that would help if applied, for what did one person good did another harm. No constitution proved strong enough against it, whether in strength or weakness, but it carried off all alike, even those treated with every kind of regimen. The most terrible thing in the whole calamity was the despair when anyone realized he was sick, for their minds turned at once to hopelessness, so that they abandoned themselves far more readily and did not resist; and the fact that they caught it from nursing one another and died like sheep. This caused the greatest loss of life. For if they were afraid and 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 died, especially those who had any claim to decency; for they were ashamed to spare themselves and went in to their friends, since in the end even the members of the family grew weary of their lamentations for the dying, overcome by the vastness of the calamity. Yet those who had come through it showed still more pity for the dying and the suffering, because they knew it from experience and were themselves now confident; for it did not attack the same person twice, at least not fatally. They were congratulated by others, and they themselves, in the exhilaration of the moment, had some vain hope that in future too they would never die of any other disease.

52 In addition to the existing hardship, they were oppressed still more by the crowding in from the country to the city, and the newcomers not least. There were no houses for them, and they were living in stifling huts in the hot season of the year, so they died in total disorder. The bodies of the dying lay one on top of another, and half-dead men staggered about in the streets and around all the fountains, longing for water. The temples where they had camped were full of the corpses of those who had died there. For the calamity was overwhelming, and men, not knowing what would become of them, came to disregard everything, sacred and profane alike. All the customs they had previously observed in burials were thrown into confusion, and they buried their dead as each one could. Many, lacking the necessary means because so many of their family had already died, turned to shameless ways of disposing of the dead. Some would put their own dead on a pyre that others had built, getting there before the builders, and set it alight; others threw the body they were carrying on top of another that was already burning, and went away.

53 In other respects too the plague was the beginning of greater lawlessness in the city. Men now more readily dared to indulge openly in pleasures they would once have hidden, seeing how swift the reversal was: the prosperous dying suddenly, and those who had possessed nothing before taking over their property at once. So they thought it right to seek quick gratification, aimed at pleasure, regarding their lives and their money alike as things of a day. No one was eager to persevere in what was thought honorable, since he thought it uncertain whether he would die before he attained it. Whatever was pleasant for the moment, and whatever contributed to that from any source, became both honorable and useful. No fear of the gods or law of men restrained them. As for the gods, they judged it the same whether they worshiped them or not, seeing all alike perishing; and as for offenses, no one expected to live until he was brought to trial and paid the penalty. Much heavier, they thought, was the sentence already passed on them and hanging over their heads, and before it fell it was only reasonable to get some enjoyment out of life.

54 Such was the calamity that had fallen on the Athenians and was weighing them down, with men dying inside the walls and the land being ravaged outside. In their distress they naturally recalled this verse, which the older men said had been chanted long ago: “A Dorian war shall come, and plague with it.” There was a dispute about whether the word the ancients used in the verse was not loimos, plague, but limos, famine; but under the circumstances the view naturally prevailed that it was “plague,” for men shaped their memory to fit what they were suffering. But I think that if another Dorian war should ever come after this one, and a famine should happen to occur, they will in all likelihood recite it that way. Those who knew of it also remembered the oracle given to the Lacedaemonians, when they asked the god whether they should go to war, and he answered that if they fought with all their might, victory would be theirs, and that he himself would take their part. As for the oracle, they supposed that what was happening matched it. The disease began immediately after the Peloponnesians had invaded, and it did not enter the Peloponnese, at least not to any extent worth mentioning, but it spread through Athens above all, and then through the most populous of the other places. That is the history of the plague.

55 After the Peloponnesians had ravaged the plain, they advanced into the so-called Paralus region as far as Laurium, where the Athenians have their silver mines. First they ravaged the part that faces the Peloponnese, then the part that faces toward Euboea and Andros. Pericles, who was general at this time too, held the same view as in the earlier invasion, that the Athenians should not go out against them.

56 While the Peloponnesians were still in the plain, before they went on to the coast, he prepared an expedition of a hundred ships against the Peloponnese, and when it was ready, he put to sea. He took on board 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, they left the Peloponnesians in Attica, in the coastal region. Arriving at Epidaurus in the Peloponnese, they ravaged most of the land, and when they assaulted the city they came to hope that they would take it, but they did not succeed. Putting out from Epidaurus, they ravaged the territory of Troezen, Halieis, and Hermione, all of which are on the coast of the Peloponnese. Setting out from there, they came to Prasiae, a small coastal town in Laconia, ravaged part of its land, and took the town itself and sacked it. After doing this they went home. They found that the Peloponnesians were no longer in Attica but had withdrawn.

57 All the time the Peloponnesians were in Athenian territory and the Athenians were campaigning with the fleet, the plague was killing Athenians both in the army and in the city. It was even said that the Peloponnesians left the country sooner than they would have because they were afraid of the disease, since they heard from deserters that it was in the city and could also see the burials. Yet in this invasion they stayed longest and ravaged the whole country, for they were in Attica about forty days.

58 In the same summer Hagnon son of Nicias and Cleopompus son of Clinias, Pericles’ fellow generals, took the force he had used and marched at once against the Chalcidians on the Thracian coast and against Potidaea, which was still under siege. When they arrived, they brought siege engines against Potidaea and tried by every means to take it. But neither the capture of the city nor anything else went as well as their resources deserved. For the plague broke out there too and pressed the Athenians very hard, ravaging the army, so that even the Athenian troops who had been there before and had been healthy until then caught it from Hagnon’s force. Phormio and his sixteen hundred men were no longer in Chalcidice. So Hagnon returned with the fleet to Athens, having lost to the plague 1,050 out of four thousand hoplites in about forty days; the soldiers who had been there before stayed where they were and continued the siege of Potidaea.

59 After the second invasion of the Peloponnesians, since their land had been ravaged a second time and the plague and the war were weighing on them together, the Athenians changed their minds. They blamed Pericles for having persuaded them to go to war, holding that it was because of him that they had fallen into these misfortunes, and they were eager to come to terms with the Lacedaemonians. They even sent envoys to them, but accomplished nothing. At their wits’ end in every direction, they turned on Pericles. When he saw them angry at the situation and doing everything just as he had expected, he called a meeting (he was still general), wanting to put heart into them, to draw the anger out of their minds, and to bring them to a calmer and less fearful state. He came forward and spoke as follows.

60 “I expected these outbursts of your anger against me, for I understand the reasons for them, and I have called this assembly for that purpose: to remind you of certain things and to rebuke you if your anger with me is unjustified, or if you are giving way to your misfortunes. I believe that a city which prospers as a whole does its private citizens more good than one in which each citizen does well while the community as a whole goes down. A man who prospers in his own affairs is ruined all the same if his country is destroyed, while one who is unfortunate in a fortunate country is far more likely to come through safely. Since, then, a city can bear the misfortunes of its individuals, but no single individual can bear the city’s, surely all must defend it, and not do what you are doing now. Stunned by your troubles at home, you are abandoning the common safety, and you are blaming both me, who advised you to go to war, and yourselves, who voted for it with me. And yet the man you are angry with is one who, I believe, is inferior to no one in knowing what must be done and in explaining it, a man who loves his city and is above money. For a man who has knowledge but fails to 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 will not speak as a friend would; and one who has this loyalty too, but can be overcome by money, would sell everything for that alone. So if you were persuaded to go to war because you thought I had these qualities even to a moderate degree more than others, it would not be reasonable for me to be charged now with having done wrong.

61 “For those who have a choice, and are prospering in other respects, it is great folly to go to war. But if the necessity was either to give way and at once submit to our neighbors, or to run the risk and prevail, then the man who flees the danger is more to blame than the one who stands up to it. I am the same man, and I have not shifted my position. It is you who are changing. You were persuaded while you were unhurt, and you repent now that you are suffering, and my argument appears wrong to you because your judgment is weak. For each of you already feels what hurts, while the benefit has not yet become clear to all; and now that a great reversal has come on you, and that within a short time, your minds are too dispirited to persevere in what you resolved. For what is sudden and unexpected, and what happens wholly contrary to calculation, enslaves the spirit; and this has happened to you, not least with the plague, on top of everything else. Nevertheless, as citizens of a great city, brought up in a way of life worthy of it, you must be willing to stand up even to the greatest misfortunes and not let your reputation fade. (For men think it equally right to blame anyone who, through softness, falls short of the reputation he has, and to hate anyone who, through presumption, reaches for a reputation that does not belong to him.) You must put aside your private griefs and take hold of the common safety.

62 “As for the hardship of the war, and your fear that it may be great and that we may be no nearer to winning, let it be enough for you that I have often shown on other occasions that this suspicion is unfounded. But I will also point out this advantage you have regarding the greatness of your empire, which I think you have never yet considered yourselves, and which I did not mention in my earlier speeches. Nor would I mention it now, since the claim sounds rather boastful, if I did not see you discouraged beyond reason. You think your empire extends only over your allies. But I declare to you that of the two parts of the world that lie open to man’s use, land and sea, you are absolute masters of the whole of one, both as far as you now control it and farther if you wish. There is no one, neither the King nor any other people on earth today, who will stop you from sailing where you will with the naval force you now possess. So this power is of quite another order from 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 make light of them, regarding them, in comparison with this power, as a little garden and an ornament of wealth. You should recognize that freedom, if we hold on to it and preserve it, will easily recover these things, while those who submit to others tend to lose even what they had before. You should not prove worse in either respect than your fathers, who won these things by their own toil and did not inherit them from others, and then held them and preserved them and handed them down to you (and it is more disgraceful to be robbed of what one has than to fail in trying to acquire it). Go to meet your enemies not with spirit alone but with disdain. For boastfulness can come even from a lucky ignorance, even to a coward; but disdain belongs to the man who is confident, by his judgment, that he is superior to his enemy, and that is our position. And where fortune is equal, intelligence, from a sense of superiority, makes daring more secure, since it relies less on hope, whose strength lies in desperate situations, and more on judgment based on the facts, whose foresight is more certain.

63 “It is right for you to support the city’s dignity, which she derives from her empire and in which you all take pride, and not to shun the burdens unless you also give up pursuing the honors. And do not suppose that you are fighting over a single issue, slavery or freedom; at stake also is the loss of your 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, if anyone, out of fear in the present situation, is playing the honest man by advocating a quiet life. For by now the empire you hold is like a tyranny: to take it may seem unjust, but to let it go is dangerous. Men of that kind would very quickly ruin a city if they persuaded others, and they would do the same if they settled somewhere on their own as an independent state. For the quiet life cannot survive unless it is ranged alongside men of action; and it is of no advantage in a ruling city, but only in a subject one, where it means safe servitude.

64 “Do not be led astray by citizens like these, and do not be angry with me, since you yourselves joined me in voting for war, even if the enemy has invaded and done what was to be expected once you refused to submit, and even if, beyond everything we anticipated, this plague has come upon us, the one thing of all that has proved beyond our foresight. I know that I am hated somewhat more because of it, unjustly, unless you will also credit me whenever you have some unexpected stroke of good fortune. One must bear what the gods send as necessity, and what comes from the enemy with courage. That was the habit of this city in the past; let it not be checked now in you. Recognize that she has the greatest name among all mankind because she does not give way to misfortunes, and because she has spent more lives and labor in war than any other, and has won the greatest power that has existed down to our time. The memory of it will be left to those who come after us forever, even if we should now give way a little at some point (for all things are born to decline): that we, Hellenes, ruled the greatest number of Hellenes, that we held out in the greatest wars against them, both all together and separately, and that we lived in the city that was richest in all things and greatest. The man who prefers a quiet life may find fault with this, but the man who wants to act himself will emulate it, and anyone who has not achieved it will envy it. To be hated and resented for the present has always been the lot of all who have presumed to rule others; but whoever incurs envy for the greatest ends judges rightly. Hatred does not last long, but present brilliance and future glory are left behind, remembered forever. You must look ahead to future honor and to present freedom from disgrace, and win both by your eagerness now. Do not send heralds to the Lacedaemonians, and do not let them see that you are weighed down by your present hardships. For those who are least distressed in spirit by misfortune and resist it most firmly in action are the strongest, both among cities and among individuals.”

65 With words like these Pericles tried to free the Athenians from their anger against him and to turn their minds away from their present troubles. Publicly they were persuaded by his arguments; they sent no more envoys to the Lacedaemonians and were more eager for the war. But privately they were pained by their sufferings: the common people because, having had little to begin with, they had been deprived even of that; the powerful because they had lost fine estates in the country, with their buildings and costly furnishings; and most of all because they had war instead of peace. And indeed they did not as a whole give up their anger against him until they had fined him. Not long afterward, however, as a crowd tends to do, they elected him general again and entrusted all their affairs to him, for by now each man felt his private sorrows less keenly, and they judged him the most valuable man for what the city as a whole needed. For as long as he led the city in peacetime, he guided it with moderation and kept it safe, and under him it reached its greatest height; and when the war broke out, he evidently foresaw the city’s strength in this too. He lived for two years and six months after it began,⁶ and after his death his foresight about the war was recognized still more. He had told them that they would prevail if they kept quiet, looked after their navy, did not try to extend their empire during the war, and did not put the city at risk. They did the very opposite of all this, and in other matters that seemed to have nothing to do with the war they pursued policies, out of private ambition and private gain, that were bad for themselves and for their allies. When these succeeded, the honor and advantage went mostly to individuals; when they failed, the damage fell on the city in the war. The reason was that Pericles, powerful through his standing and his judgment, and conspicuously incorruptible, restrained the people freely. He led them rather than being led by them, because he had not acquired his power by improper means and did not speak to please them; he had such standing that he could even contradict them to their anger. Whenever he saw them insolently overconfident at the wrong time, he would speak and strike them into fear; and when they were unreasonably afraid, he would restore them to confidence. What was in name a democracy was in fact rule by the first man. His successors, who were more on a level with one another and each of whom was striving to be first, turned to pleasing the people and even handing over affairs to them. From this, as was to be expected in a great city with an empire, came many mistakes, among them the expedition to Sicily.⁷ This was not so much an error of judgment about the people they were attacking as a failure on the part of those who sent it out to follow it up with what the men who had gone needed. Instead, absorbed in their private intrigues over the leadership of the people, they blunted the army’s efforts and for the first time fell into civil strife with one another at home. Yet even after their disaster in Sicily, where they lost the rest of their armament and the greater part of their fleet, and when the city was already in civil strife, they held out for three years⁸ against their former enemies, against the Sicilians who had joined them, against most of their allies, who were now in revolt, and later against Cyrus, the King’s son, who joined them and provided money to the Peloponnesians for their fleet. And they did not give in until they had brought themselves down by falling on one another in their private quarrels. So abundant, then, were the grounds Pericles had at the time for his foresight, and for his belief that the city would very easily prevail in the war over the Peloponnesians alone.

66 In the same summer the Lacedaemonians and their allies made an expedition with a hundred ships against the island of Zacynthus, which lies opposite Elis. The Zacynthians are colonists of the Achaeans from the Peloponnese, and they were allies of the Athenians. On board were a thousand Lacedaemonian hoplites, and Cnemus, a Spartiate, was admiral. They landed and ravaged most of the country, and when the people would not come to terms, they sailed back home.

67 At the end of the same summer Aristeus of Corinth, the Lacedaemonian envoys Aneristus, Nicolaus, and Pratodamus, Timagoras of Tegea, and Pollis of Argos, who was acting in a private capacity, were on their way to Asia, to the King, to see if they could persuade him to supply money and join in the war. They went first to Sitalces son of Teres in Thrace, wanting to persuade him, if they could, to leave the Athenian alliance and march on Potidaea, where an Athenian army was conducting the siege, and also, with his help, to travel as they intended across the Hellespont to Pharnaces son of Pharnabazus, who was to send them on up to the King. But Athenian envoys happened to be with Sitalces, Learchus son of Callimachus and Ameiniades son of Philemon, and they persuaded Sadocus, the son of Sitalces who had been made an Athenian, to hand the men over to them, so that they would not get across to the King and do harm to his city, which in part was his own. He was persuaded, and as they were traveling through Thrace to the boat in which they were to cross the Hellespont, he arrested them before they could board, sending men along with Learchus and Ameiniades with orders to hand them over to these two. They took them and brought them to Athens. When they arrived, the Athenians were afraid that Aristeus, if he escaped, would do them still more harm, since he had evidently been responsible for everything at Potidaea and on the Thracian coast before this. So, without trial, and though they wanted to say something, they put them all to death that same day and threw them into a pit. They thought it right to retaliate in the same way as the Lacedaemonians had begun, for these had killed and thrown into pits the traders of the Athenians and their allies whom they had caught sailing around the Peloponnese in merchant ships. For at the beginning of the war the Lacedaemonians killed as enemies all whom they caught at sea, both those fighting on the Athenian side and those who were on neither side.

68 At about the same time, at the end of the summer, the Ambraciots, with many of the barbarians whom they had called to arms, made an expedition against Amphilochian Argos and the rest of Amphilochia. Their enmity toward the Argives had first arisen in the following way. Amphilochian Argos and the rest of Amphilochia were founded after the Trojan War by Amphilochus son of Amphiaraus, who on returning home was dissatisfied with the state of affairs in Argos and founded them on the Ambracian Gulf, naming the city Argos after his own country. (This city was the largest in Amphilochia and had the most powerful inhabitants.) Many generations later, under the pressure of misfortunes, they called in the Ambraciots, their neighbors on the Amphilochian border, to share the city, and they first learned the Greek they now speak from the Ambraciots who settled with them; the rest of the Amphilochians are barbarians. In time the Ambraciots drove out the Argives and held the city themselves. When this happened, the Amphilochians put themselves under the protection of the Acarnanians, and together the two of them called in the Athenians, who sent them Phormio as general with thirty ships. When Phormio arrived, they took Argos by storm and enslaved the Ambraciots, and the Amphilochians and Acarnanians settled it in common. After this the alliance between the Athenians and the Acarnanians was first made. The Ambraciots first conceived their hatred of the Argives from the enslavement of their own people, and later in the war they made this expedition with their own forces, the Chaonians, and some others of the neighboring barbarians. They came to Argos and were masters of the countryside, but when they could not take the city by assault, they went home and disbanded, each people to its own land. These were the events of the summer.

69 The following winter the Athenians sent twenty ships around the Peloponnese under the general Phormio, who made Naupactus his base and kept watch so that no one could sail out of Corinth and the Crisaean Gulf or into it; and six others to Caria and Lycia under the general Melesander, to collect money there and to prevent Peloponnesian privateers from using those parts as a base and harming the merchant ships sailing from Phaselis and Phoenicia and the mainland in that region. Melesander went inland into Lycia with a force of Athenians from the ships and allies, and he was defeated in battle and killed, and lost part of his force.

70 In the same winter the Potidaeans could no longer hold out under siege. The Peloponnesian invasions of Attica had done nothing to make the Athenians withdraw, their grain had run out, and many other things had already happened there in the struggle for something to eat; some had even eaten one another. So at last they made proposals for surrender to the Athenian generals posted against them, Xenophon son of Euripides, Hestiodorus son of Aristocleides, and Phanomachus son of Callimachus. The generals accepted, seeing the hardship the army was suffering in an exposed winter position, and since the city had already spent two thousand talents on the siege. They came to terms on these conditions: the Potidaeans, with their children, their wives, and their mercenaries, were to leave the city, the men with one garment each and the women with two, taking a fixed sum of money for the journey. So they left under the truce for Chalcidice and wherever each of them could go. The Athenians blamed the generals for having made terms without consulting them (for they thought they could have taken the city on whatever terms they wished), and later they sent settlers of their own to Potidaea and colonized it. These were the events of the winter, and with it ended the second year of this war, which Thucydides recorded.

71 The following summer the Peloponnesians and their allies did not invade Attica but marched against Plataea, under the command of Archidamus son of Zeuxidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians. 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 Lacedaemonians, you are not acting justly, nor in a manner worthy of yourselves or of the fathers whose sons you are, in marching against the land of the Plataeans. When Pausanias son of Cleombrotus, the Lacedaemonian, had freed Hellas from the Medes, together with those Hellenes who were willing to share the danger of the battle that was fought in our land, he offered sacrifice in the marketplace of Plataea to Zeus the Liberator, 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, and if anyone did, the allies then present were to defend them with all their strength. These are the rights your fathers gave us for the courage and zeal we showed in those dangers. But you are doing the opposite, for you have come with the Thebans, our bitterest enemies, to enslave us. We call to witness the gods who were invoked in the oaths at that time, the gods of your fathers, and the gods of our country, and we tell you not to wrong the land of Plataea or to break your oaths, but to let us live independent, as Pausanias granted.”

72 When the Plataeans had said this much, Archidamus answered: “What you say is just, men of Plataea, if your actions match your words. Be independent yourselves, as Pausanias granted you, and help us to free the others, who shared the dangers of that time and swore the oaths together with you, and are now under the Athenians. It is for their sake, and for the freedom of the rest, that this great armament and this war have come about. Best of all, take part in that liberation yourselves and abide by the oaths. If not, then do what we have already proposed to you before: keep quiet, enjoying what is your own, and take neither side; receive both sides as friends, but neither for purposes of war. That will satisfy us.” This was what Archidamus said. When the Plataean envoys had heard it, they went into the city, reported what had been said to the people, and then answered him that it was impossible for them to do what he proposed without the Athenians, for their children and wives were at Athens. They feared too for the whole city, that once the Lacedaemonians had withdrawn, the Athenians would come and not allow it, or that the Thebans, on the grounds that they were included in the oath to receive both sides, would again try to seize their city. To reassure them on these points he said: “Then hand over your city and your houses to us Lacedaemonians, show us the boundaries of your land, the number of your trees, and anything else that can be counted, and go away 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.”

73 When they heard this, they went back into the city, and after consulting with the people they said that they wished first to communicate his proposals to the Athenians, and if they could persuade them, they would do as he asked; until then, they asked him to grant them a truce and not to ravage the land. He granted them a truce for the number of days it would probably take for the journey, and did not ravage the land. The envoys went to the Athenians, consulted with them, and came back with the following message for those in the city. “Men of Plataea, the Athenians say that never before, since we became their allies, have they abandoned you to be wronged by anyone, and that they will not stand by now, but will help you with all their strength. And they adjure you by the oaths your fathers swore to make no change in the alliance.”

74 When the envoys had reported this, the Plataeans resolved not to betray the Athenians, but to endure even seeing their land ravaged, if they must, and to suffer whatever else might happen. No one was to go out any more; they would answer from the wall that it was impossible for them to do what the Lacedaemonians proposed. When they had given their answer, King Archidamus first called on the gods and heroes of the country to witness, saying: “All you gods and heroes who hold the land of Plataea, be our witnesses that we did not wrongfully invade this land in the first place, but only after these people had first abandoned our common oath. In this land our fathers prayed to you and defeated the Medes, and you made it a propitious place for the Hellenes to fight in. Nor shall we do wrong now, whatever we may do; for we have made many reasonable proposals and have not obtained them. Grant then that those who began the wrong may be punished for it, and that those who seek vengeance lawfully may obtain it.”

75 Having made this appeal to the gods, he set his army to the work of war. First they surrounded the city with a stockade made of the trees they had cut down, so that no one could get out. Then they began to raise a mound against the city, hoping that with so large an army at work the capture would be very quick. They cut timber on Cithaeron and built it up on either side of the mound, laying it crosswise like a lattice to serve as walls, so that the mound would not spread out too far. Into it they carried brushwood, stones, earth, and anything else that would help to fill it when thrown in. They went on piling it up for seventy days⁹ and nights without a break, divided into relays, so that some were carrying while others took sleep and food; and the Lacedaemonian officers in charge of the contingents of each city stood over them and kept them at the work. When the Plataeans saw the mound rising, they put together a wooden framework, set it on top of their own wall where the mound was being built against it, and filled it in with bricks taken from the nearby houses. The timbers held it together, so that the structure would not be weak as it grew high, and it had a covering of hides and skins, so that the workmen and the timbers would be protected and not struck by fire arrows. The height of the wall rose a great deal, and the mound rose no more slowly to meet it. Then the Plataeans thought of something else. They broke through the part of the wall where the mound was against it and carried the earth into the city.

76 When the Peloponnesians noticed this, they packed clay into baskets of reed and threw these into the breach, so that it would not crumble and be carried away like the loose earth. Shut off in this direction, the Plataeans stopped this, but they dug a tunnel from the city, calculated where it would come under the mound, and began once more to draw the earth away from underneath into the city. For a long time those outside did not notice, so that for all they threw on they made less progress, since their mound was being drawn away from below and kept settling into the space being emptied. But the Plataeans were afraid that even so, few as they were, they would not be able to hold out against so many, and they devised a further measure. They stopped working on the high structure opposite the mound, and starting from the low wall at either end of it, they built a crescent-shaped wall on the inside, curving in toward the city, so that if the high wall were taken, this one would hold, and the enemy would have to build another mound against it and, as they advanced inside, would have double the labor and be more exposed to attack from both sides. Along with the mound, the Peloponnesians also brought up siege engines against the city. One, which was brought up on the mound against the high structure, shook down a great part of it and terrified the Plataeans; others were brought against other parts of the wall. The Plataeans threw nooses around these and broke them off. They also hung great beams on long iron chains from both ends of two poles that were leaned out and projected over the wall, hauled the beams up crosswise, and whenever the engine was about to strike anywhere, they let the beam go, with the chains slack and no longer held in their hands; and it fell with a rush and snapped off the head of the ram.

77 After this, since their engines were doing no good and a counter-wall was being built against their mound, the Peloponnesians concluded that it was impossible to take the city by the means at hand, and they prepared to wall it in. But first they decided to try fire, to see if they could burn the city, which was not large, when a wind rose; for they were thinking of every possible method by which it might be brought over to them without expense and a siege. They brought bundles of brushwood and threw them down from the mound, first into the space between the wall and the mound. When this was quickly filled, since many hands were at work, they heaped more on, over as much of the rest of the city as they could reach from the height; then they threw in fire with sulfur and pitch and set the wood alight. A blaze arose such as no one had ever yet seen, at least up to that time, made by human hands; for in the mountains, before now, forests rubbed together by the winds have caught fire of their own accord and sent up flames from it. This fire was great, and it came very near to destroying the Plataeans after they had escaped everything else. Over a large area of the city it was impossible to come near it, and if a wind had risen to carry the fire on, as the enemy hoped, they would not have escaped. As it was, it is said that this too happened: heavy rain and thunder came on and put out the blaze, and so the danger ended.

78 When the Peloponnesians had failed in this too, they kept part of their army there, dismissed the greater part, and began to build a wall around the city in a circle, dividing the ground among the cities. There was a ditch inside the wall and another outside, from which they made their bricks. When the whole was finished, about the rising of Arcturus,¹⁰ they left guards for half the wall (the Boeotians guarded the other half), withdrew with the army, and disbanded to their cities. The Plataeans had earlier sent away to Athens their children and wives, the oldest men, and the rest of the people who were of no use. Those left behind to be besieged were four hundred of their own men and eighty Athenians, with a hundred and ten women to make bread. That was their total number when they were first besieged, and there was no one else inside the walls, slave or free. So the siege of Plataea was set in place.

79 In the same summer, at the same time as the expedition against Plataea, the Athenians marched with two thousand of their own hoplites and two hundred cavalry against the Chalcidians on the Thracian coast and the Bottiaeans, when the grain was ripe. Xenophon son of Euripides was in command, with two others. They came to Spartolus in Bottice and destroyed the grain. It was thought, too, that the city would come over to them through the efforts of some people inside. But those who were against this sent to Olynthus, and hoplites and other troops came to garrison the city. These came out from Spartolus to fight, and the Athenians formed up for battle under the city itself. The Chalcidian hoplites, with some mercenaries, were defeated by the Athenians and withdrew into Spartolus; but the Chalcidian cavalry and light-armed troops defeated the Athenian cavalry and light-armed. The Chalcidians had a few peltasts from the land called Crusis. Just after the battle had been fought, more peltasts came to help from Olynthus. When the light-armed troops in Spartolus saw them, they were encouraged by the reinforcements and by the fact that they had not been beaten before, and together with the Chalcidian cavalry and the newcomers they attacked the Athenians again. The Athenians fell back on the two companies they had left with the baggage. Whenever the Athenians advanced, the enemy gave way, but when they retired, the enemy pressed hard on them and hurled javelins at them. The Chalcidian cavalry rode up and charged wherever it seemed best, and, causing the greatest panic, they routed the Athenians and pursued them a long way. The Athenians took refuge in Potidaea, and later, after recovering their dead under a truce, they 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.

80 In the same summer, not long after this, the Ambraciots and the Chaonians, wanting to subdue the whole of Acarnania and detach it from the Athenians, persuaded the Lacedaemonians to prepare a fleet from their alliance and to send a thousand hoplites against Acarnania. They said that if the Lacedaemonians came with ships and infantry together, alongside them, the Acarnanians on the coast would be unable to come to the help of the rest, and they would easily take Acarnania and then be masters of Zacynthus and Cephallenia as well, and the Athenians would no longer be able to sail around the Peloponnese as before; there was also hope of taking Naupactus. The Lacedaemonians were persuaded and at once sent Cnemus, who was still admiral, and the hoplites on a few ships, and sent word around to the fleet to get ready and sail to Leucas as quickly as possible. The Corinthians were especially eager to help the Ambraciots, who were their colonists. The ships from Corinth, Sicyon, and the places in that region were still being got ready, while those from Leucas, Anactorium, and Ambracia had arrived first and were waiting at Leucas. Cnemus and his thousand hoplites, once they had crossed over without being noticed by Phormio, who commanded the twenty Athenian ships on guard off Naupactus, at once began to prepare the campaign by land. Of the Hellenes he had with him the Ambraciots, Leucadians, and Anactorians, and the thousand Peloponnesians he had brought himself; of the barbarians, a thousand Chaonians, who have no king and were led by Photius and Nicanor, holding the annual leadership from the ruling family. With the Chaonians marched the Thesprotians, who also have no king. Sabylinthus, guardian of King Tharyps, who was still a boy, led the Molossians and the Atintanians, and Oroedus, their king, led the Paravaeans. A thousand Orestians, whose king was Antiochus, marched with the Paravaeans, Antiochus having entrusted them to Oroedus. Perdiccas too, without the knowledge of the Athenians, sent a thousand Macedonians, who arrived too late. With this army Cnemus set out, without waiting for the fleet from Corinth. Passing through the territory of Argos, they sacked Limnaea, an unwalled village. They came to Stratus, the largest city of Acarnania, thinking that if they took it first, the rest would easily come over to them.

81 When the Acarnanians learned that a large army had invaded by land and that the enemy would also be there from the sea with ships, they did not unite to resist but each guarded his own territory, and they sent to Phormio asking him to help them. He replied that he could not leave Naupactus unprotected when a fleet was about to sail out of Corinth. The Peloponnesians and their allies divided themselves into three divisions and advanced on the city of the Stratians, intending to camp near it and, if they could not persuade them by words, to try the wall by force. The Chaonians and the other barbarians advanced in the center; on their right were the Leucadians, the Anactorians, and those with them; on the left were Cnemus with the Peloponnesians and the Ambraciots. They were far apart from one another, and at times not even within sight. The Hellenes advanced in order and kept on guard until they had camped in a suitable place. But the Chaonians, confident in themselves and regarded by the people of that mainland as the best fighters, did not stop to take up a position for a camp; rushing forward with the other barbarians, they thought they would take the city at the first shout and that the achievement would be theirs. The Stratians, learning that they were still advancing, thought that if they could defeat them while they were on their own, the Hellenes would no longer be so ready to come against them. So they set ambushes around the city, and when the barbarians were near, they fell on them both from the city, charging at close quarters, and from the ambushes. The Chaonians panicked and many of them were killed, and when the other barbarians saw them give way, they did not stand their ground either but took to flight. Neither of the Hellenic divisions noticed the battle, because the barbarians had gone so far ahead and they supposed that they were hurrying on to find a site for a camp. But when the barbarians in their flight burst in upon them, they took them in, united their two camps, and stayed quiet 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 come to their help, but used slings on them from a distance and put them in great difficulty, for they could not move without armor. The Acarnanians are thought to be the best at this kind of fighting.

82 When night came, Cnemus withdrew his army quickly to the river Anapus, eighty stades from Stratus, and the next day he recovered the dead under a truce. The Oeniadae had joined him out of friendship, and he withdrew into their territory before the Acarnanian reinforcements arrived. From there each went home. The Stratians set up a trophy for the battle against the barbarians.

83 The fleet from Corinth and the other allies from the Crisaean Gulf, which was supposed to join Cnemus and prevent the coastal Acarnanians from coming to help those inland, did not arrive. Instead, at about the same time as the battle at Stratus, they were forced to fight at sea against Phormio and the twenty Athenian ships on guard at Naupactus. For Phormio was watching them as they sailed along the coast out of the gulf, wanting to attack them in open water. The Corinthians and their allies were not sailing as if for a sea battle, but were equipped rather for military operations in Acarnania, and they never imagined that the Athenians with their twenty ships would dare to give battle to their own forty-seven. But they saw the Athenians keeping pace with them along the opposite shore while they themselves were coasting along their own side, and when they tried to cross from Patrae in Achaea to the mainland opposite, heading for Acarnania, they caught sight of the Athenians sailing toward them from Chalcis and the river Evenus; they had not escaped notice by slipping out of their anchorage at night. So they were forced to fight in the middle of the strait. Each city had its own generals, who were preparing its contingent; those of the Corinthians were Machaon, Isocrates, and Agatharchidas. The Peloponnesians formed their ships into a circle as large as they could without leaving room for the enemy to break through, prows outward and sterns inward, and inside it they placed the light craft that were sailing with them and the five fastest ships, so that they could sail out quickly and be on hand wherever the enemy attacked.

84 The Athenians, in single file, sailed around them in a circle and drove them into a narrower space, always just grazing them as they went by and giving the impression that they were about to charge at any moment. But Phormio had ordered them beforehand not to attack until he gave the signal. For he hoped that the Peloponnesians would not keep their formation, as an army does on land, but that the ships would fall foul of one another and the small craft would add to the confusion. And if the wind blew out of the gulf, as it usually did toward dawn and for which he was waiting as he sailed around, he expected they would not keep steady for a moment. As for the attack, he thought it was in his own hands, whenever he wished, since his ships were the better sailers, and that this would be the best moment for it. When the wind came down and the ships, already in a narrow space, were thrown into confusion by both the wind and the small craft pressing on them at once, ship fell against ship and they were pushing each other off with poles. With their shouting, their warnings to one another, and their abuse, they could hear nothing of the orders or the boatswains’ calls; and the men, inexperienced as they were, could not lift their oars clear in the swell, which made the ships less responsive to their helmsmen. At that moment, then, Phormio gave the signal. The Athenians charged and first sank one of the admirals’ ships, then destroyed the others wherever they went, and reduced them to such a state that in the confusion not one of them turned to resist, but they fled to Patrae and Dyme in Achaea. The Athenians pursued them and captured twelve ships, took on board most of the men from them, and sailed off to Molycrium. They set up a trophy on the Rhium, dedicated a ship to Poseidon, and returned to Naupactus. The Peloponnesians, too, at once sailed with their remaining ships from Dyme and Patrae along the coast to Cyllene, the port of the Eleans. Cnemus also arrived at Cyllene from Leucas after the battle at Stratus, with the ships from there that were supposed to have joined this fleet.

85 The Lacedaemonians sent Timocrates, Brasidas, and Lycophron to Cnemus as advisers for the fleet, with orders to prepare for another and better sea battle and not to be driven off the sea by a few ships. For it seemed to them, especially since this was their first attempt at a sea battle, that the outcome was very much against expectation; they did not think their fleet was so inferior, but that there had been some cowardice, and they did not weigh the long experience of the Athenians against their own brief practice. So they sent the advisers in anger. When these arrived, they and Cnemus sent around to the cities for more ships and fitted out those they already had for a sea battle. Phormio too sent messengers to Athens to report their preparations and to tell of the battle they had won, and he asked the Athenians to send him as many ships as possible quickly, since there was always the prospect of a battle any day. They sent him twenty ships, but ordered the man bringing them to go first to Crete. For Nicias, a Cretan of Gortyn who was their proxenus, persuaded them to sail against Cydonia, saying he would bring it over to them, though it was hostile. He was in fact bringing them in as a favor to the Polichnitans, neighbors of the Cydonians. So the commander took the ships and went to Crete, and with the Polichnitans he ravaged the land of the Cydonians, and because of winds and bad sailing weather he spent no little time there.

86 While the Athenians were held up around Crete, the Peloponnesians at Cyllene, prepared for a sea battle, sailed along the coast to Panormus in Achaea, where the Peloponnesian land army had come to support them. Phormio also sailed along the coast to Molycrian Rhium and anchored outside it with the twenty ships with which he had fought before. This Rhium was friendly to the Athenians; the other Rhium is opposite it, in the Peloponnese. They are about seven stades apart across the sea, and this is the mouth of the Crisaean Gulf. So the Peloponnesians, with seventy-seven ships, anchored off Achaean Rhium, which is not far from Panormus, where their land forces were, once they had seen the Athenians. For six or seven days the two fleets lay at anchor facing each other, practicing and preparing for the battle. The Peloponnesians were resolved not to sail out beyond the Rhia into open water, for fear of a repetition of their earlier disaster; the Athenians were resolved not to sail into the narrows, since they thought a battle in a confined space was to the enemy’s advantage. Then Cnemus, Brasidas, and the other Peloponnesian commanders, wanting to fight quickly before reinforcements came from Athens, first called the soldiers together. Seeing that most of them were afraid because of their earlier defeat and were not eager, they encouraged them, speaking as follows.

87 “Peloponnesians, if any of you is afraid of the coming battle because of the one that has been fought, that battle gives you no just reason for fear. Its preparations, as you know, were inadequate, and we were sailing not so much for a sea battle as for a military expedition. It happened, too, that chance worked against us in no small way, and perhaps our inexperience, fighting at sea for the first time, also made us fail. So our defeat did not come about through cowardice on our part. And it is not right that our spirit, which was not overcome by force and has something to say for itself, should be blunted by the outcome of the misfortune. Rather, you should consider that men may suffer setbacks by fortune, but that the same men, in spirit, are always rightly brave, and that while courage is present, they could not reasonably plead inexperience as an excuse for being cowards on any occasion. In your case, your inexperience falls short less than your daring surpasses. The skill of these men, which you fear most, will, if joined with courage, also have the presence of mind in danger to carry out what it has learned; but without a brave spirit no skill is of any use against danger. For fear drives out presence of mind, and skill without valor is of no help. So against their greater experience set your greater daring, and against your fear because of your defeat set the fact that you happened to be unprepared at the time. You have the advantage in the number of ships and in fighting close to land that is friendly, with your hoplites present; and for the most part victory goes to those who are more numerous and better prepared. So we find not a single reason why we should be likely to fail. And the very mistakes we made before, added to our experience, will now serve as lessons. Take heart, then, helmsmen and sailors, and each of you follow his orders, not leaving the post to which he is assigned. We will prepare the attack no worse than your former commanders, and we will give no one an excuse to be a coward. But if anyone does choose to be one, he will be punished as he deserves, and the brave will be honored with the rewards that befit their courage.”

88 In this way the Peloponnesian commanders encouraged their men. Phormio, too, was afraid of the nervousness of his men, and he noticed that they were gathering in groups among themselves and were frightened by the number of the enemy ships. He wanted to call them together and give them heart and encouragement in the present situation. Before this he had always told them and prepared their minds to believe that no number of ships was so great, if it sailed against them, that they could not stand up to it, and the men had long ago come to hold this conviction among themselves, that as Athenians they would never give way before any mass of Peloponnesian ships. But now, seeing that they were discouraged by the sight before them, he wanted to remind them of the reasons for confidence, and he called the Athenians together and spoke as follows.

89 “Soldiers, I have called you together because I see that you are frightened by the enemy’s numbers, and I do not think it right that you should be in dread of what is not to be feared. In the first place, these men have prepared this great number of ships, and not an equal force, because they have already been defeated and do not themselves believe that they are a match for us. Secondly, as for what they chiefly rely on as they come against us, the belief that it is their birthright to be brave, their confidence comes from nothing else than their success in most things through their experience on land, and they think it will do the same for them at sea. By rights the same advantage should now be ours at sea, if it is theirs on land, since they are in no way superior in courage; and each side is the more confident in the field where it is more experienced. Then too, the Lacedaemonians, who lead them, are bringing the majority into danger against their will, for the sake of their own reputation; otherwise, after being so badly beaten, they would never have attempted to fight at sea again. So do not be afraid of their daring. You inspire much more fear in them, and with better reason, both because you have already defeated them and because they believe you would not be standing up to them unless you meant to do something worthy of the odds. For opponents who are more numerous, as these are, come on trusting more in their strength than in their judgment; but those who face them from much weaker resources, and that without compulsion, dare to do so because they have something great to rely on in the firmness of their resolve. Reckoning this, they fear us more because our conduct is unexpected than they would a force in proportion to their own. Many armies before now have been overthrown by smaller forces through inexperience, some also through lack of daring; and neither of these applies to us now. As for the battle, I will not fight it in the gulf if I can help it, nor will I sail into it. For I see that a confined space is no advantage to a few experienced and faster ships against many unskilled ones. One cannot charge properly to ram without seeing the enemy from a long way off, nor can one back away at the right moment when hard pressed; there is no room to break through the line or to wheel around, which are the tactics of faster ships. The sea battle would necessarily become a land battle, and in that the larger number of ships has the advantage. I will look after these things as best I can. You must stay in good order at your ships and take your orders promptly, especially since the enemy is anchored so close to us; and in action, put discipline and silence above everything. This is useful in most military operations, and not least in a sea battle. Fight these men in a manner worthy of what you have already done. The contest before you is a great one: either to destroy the Peloponnesians’ hope of a navy, or to bring nearer to the Athenians the fear for their command of the sea. I remind you again that you have defeated most of them already, and men who have been beaten do not face the same dangers again with the same spirit.”

90 Such was the encouragement Phormio gave. When the Athenians did not sail against them into the gulf and the narrows, the Peloponnesians, wanting to draw them in against their will, put out at dawn and sailed with their ships formed four deep along their own coast, toward the inner part of the gulf, with their right wing leading, as they had been lying at anchor. On this wing they had placed their twenty fastest ships, so that if Phormio, thinking they were sailing against Naupactus, should also sail along the coast to its defense, the Athenians would not be able to escape their attack by sailing past outside their wing, but these ships would close them in. Phormio did what they expected. Alarmed for the place, which was unguarded, when he saw them putting out, he put his men aboard hurriedly and against his will and sailed along the coast, while the Messenian infantry marched along the shore to help. When the Peloponnesians saw them sailing along in single file, already inside the gulf and close to the land, which was exactly what they wanted, at a single signal they suddenly turned their ships and sailed in line abreast at the Athenians as fast as each could, hoping to cut off all their ships. Of the Athenian ships, the eleven in the lead escaped the Peloponnesian wing and its turning movement into open water; but the others were caught as they tried to escape, driven ashore, and disabled, and those of the Athenians on board who did not swim away were killed. The Peloponnesians took some of the ships in tow and dragged them off empty (one they had already taken with its crew), but some were rescued by the Messenians, who came to their help, waded into the sea in their armor, boarded them, and fought from the decks, just as they were being towed away.

91 In this part of the battle, then, the Peloponnesians were victorious and disabled the Athenian ships. But their twenty ships on the right wing were chasing the eleven Athenian ships that had escaped the turning movement into open water. These, all but one, got away from them and reached Naupactus first; they put in at the temple of Apollo, turned their prows outward, and prepared to defend themselves if the enemy sailed in to the shore against them. The Peloponnesians came up later, singing the paean as they sailed, as though they had won, and a single Leucadian ship, far ahead of the rest, was chasing the one Athenian ship that had been left behind. There happened to be a merchant ship anchored offshore. The Athenian ship got to it first, circled around it, rammed the pursuing Leucadian amidships, and sank it. This unexpected and astonishing event threw the Peloponnesians into a panic. Besides, they had been chasing in disorder because they were winning. Some of the ships dropped their oars and stopped, intending to wait for the main body, which was a bad move with the enemy so close and ready to charge; others, through ignorance of the waters, ran aground on the shoals.

92 When the Athenians saw this happening, they took heart, and at a single word of command they raised a shout and charged them. Because of the mistakes they had made and their present disorder, the Peloponnesians held out only a short time and then fled to Panormus, from where they had put out. The Athenians pursued them, captured the six ships nearest to them, and recovered their own ships, which the Peloponnesians had disabled near the shore at the start and taken in tow. Some of the men they killed, and some they took prisoner. On board the Leucadian ship that was sunk near the merchant ship was Timocrates the Lacedaemonian, and when the ship was going down he killed himself; his body was washed up in the harbor of Naupactus. The Athenians withdrew and set up a trophy at the place from which they had put out to win their victory. They took up the dead and the wreckage that lay off their own coast, and gave back to the enemy their dead 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 they dedicated the ship they had taken on Achaean Rhium beside the trophy. After this, fearing the arrival of Athenian reinforcements, they all sailed by night into the Crisaean Gulf and to Corinth, except the Leucadians. Not long after their withdrawal, the Athenians from Crete, with the twenty ships that should have joined Phormio before the battle, arrived at Naupactus. And the summer ended.

93 Before dispersing the fleet that had withdrawn to Corinth and the Crisaean Gulf, Cnemus, Brasidas, and the other Peloponnesian commanders, at the beginning of the winter, wanted to make an attempt on Piraeus, the harbor of the Athenians, at the suggestion of the Megarians. It was unguarded and not closed off, naturally enough, since the Athenians had such a great superiority at sea. The plan was for each of the sailors to take his oar, his cushion, and his oar-loop and go on foot from Corinth to the sea on the side facing Athens, then hurry to Megara, launch from Nisaea, their dockyard, forty ships that happened to be there, and sail straight for Piraeus. For there was no fleet on guard there, and no one had any expectation that the enemy would ever make a surprise attack in this way, since it was thought they would not dare to do it openly and at leisure, and that if they planned it, it would be found out in advance. Once they had decided, they set out at once. They arrived at night, launched the ships from Nisaea, and sailed, not for Piraeus any longer, as they had intended, since they took fright at the danger (and it is said a wind also prevented them), but 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 in or out of Megara. They attacked the fort, towed away the triremes empty, and fell on the rest of Salamis unexpectedly and plundered it.

94 Fire signals were raised to warn Athens of the enemy, and a panic arose there as great as any in the war. Those in the city thought the enemy had already sailed into Piraeus, and those in Piraeus thought Salamis had been taken and that the enemy were all but sailing in on them. And this could easily have happened if they had been willing not to lose their nerve; no wind would have stopped them. At daybreak the Athenians rushed in full force to Piraeus, launched ships, went aboard in haste and with great uproar, and sailed with the ships for Salamis, while with the infantry they posted guards at Piraeus. When the Peloponnesians learned that help was coming, they quickly sailed off for Nisaea, after overrunning most of Salamis and taking people and plunder and the three ships from the fort at Budorum. For they were also somewhat afraid of their ships, which had been launched after a long time out of the water and were not at all watertight. When they reached Megara, they went back on foot to Corinth. The Athenians, no longer finding them at Salamis, also sailed back, and after this they guarded Piraeus more carefully in future, closing the harbors and taking other precautions.

95 At about the same time, at the beginning of this winter, Sitalces son of Teres, the Odrysian, king of the Thracians, marched against Perdiccas son of Alexander, king of Macedonia, and against the Chalcidians on the Thracian coast, wanting to enforce one promise and to fulfill another himself. Perdiccas had made him a promise, if he would reconcile him with the Athenians, who had been pressing him hard at the beginning of the war, and if he would not restore his brother Philip, who was his enemy, to the throne; and Perdiccas did not fulfill what he had undertaken. Sitalces himself, for his part, had agreed with the Athenians, when he made the alliance, to bring the Chalcidian war on the Thracian coast to an end. So he made the expedition for both reasons, and he brought with him Amyntas son of Philip, to make him king of the Macedonians, and the Athenian envoys who happened to be with him on this business, and Hagnon as their leader; for the Athenians too were to join him against the Chalcidians with ships and as large an army as possible.

96 Setting out from the Odrysians, he called up first the Thracians within Mount Haemus and Rhodope, all those he ruled as far as the sea, and then the Getae beyond Haemus, and the other peoples who lived south of the river Ister, toward the coast of the Euxine Sea. The Getae and the people of that region border on the Scythians and are equipped as they are, all mounted archers. He also called on many of the mountain Thracians who are independent and carry swords, who are called the Dii and live mostly on Rhodope. Some of them he won over with pay, and others followed as volunteers. He also called up the Agrianians, the Laeaeans, and the other Paeonian peoples he ruled; these were at the edge of his empire. For his empire extended toward the Paeonians, who were independent from there on, as far as the Laeaean Paeonians and the river Strymon, which flows from Mount Scombrus through the Agrianians and Laeaeans. On the side of the Triballi, who were also independent, its boundary was formed by the Treres and the Tilataeans. These live north of Mount Scombrus and extend westward as far as the river Oscius. This river flows from the same mountain as the Nestus and the Hebrus. The mountain is uninhabited and large, adjoining Rhodope.

97 The empire of the Odrysians extended along the coast from the city of Abdera to the Euxine Sea as far as the river Ister. The voyage around this coast by the shortest route, if the wind is always astern, takes a merchant ship four days and as many nights; by land, a man traveling light covers the shortest route from Abdera to the Ister in eleven days. Such was its extent along the coast. Inland, from Byzantium to the Laeaeans and the Strymon (for here it reached farthest from the sea), it was a thirteen days’ journey for a man traveling light. The tribute from all the barbarian territory and from the Hellenic cities, at the highest it reached under Seuthes, who reigned after Sitalces and raised it the most, was worth about four hundred talents of silver, paid in gold and silver. Gifts of gold and silver no less in value than this were brought as well, besides woven and plain stuffs and other goods, and these not only to the king but also to the lesser rulers and the nobles of the Odrysians. For they had established a custom that was the opposite of that of the Persian kingdom, namely to take rather than to give (and it was more shameful not to give when asked than to ask and be refused). The other Thracians also had this custom, but the Odrysians, because of their power, made more use of it; it was impossible to get anything done without giving gifts. So the kingdom reached great strength. Of all the kingdoms in Europe between the Ionian Gulf and the Euxine Sea, it was the greatest in revenue and general prosperity, though in military strength and the size of its army it came a long way second to the Scythians. With the Scythians no nation in Europe can compare, nor indeed in Asia is there any single people that could stand up to the Scythians if they were all united. Yet in good counsel and intelligence about the ordinary business of life they are not equal to others.

98 Sitalces, then, king of so great a country, prepared his army. When he was ready, he set out and marched on Macedonia, first through his own territory, then over Cercine, an uninhabited mountain on the border between the Sinti and the Paeonians. He crossed it by the road he had made earlier himself, cutting through the forest, when he campaigned against the Paeonians. Crossing the mountain from the Odrysian side, they had the Paeonians on their right and the Sinti and Maedi on their left. When they had crossed it, they reached Doberus in Paeonia. On the march his army lost no one except through sickness, but rather grew, for many of the independent Thracians followed uninvited in the hope of plunder, so that the whole number is said to have been no less than a hundred and fifty thousand. Most of this was infantry, about a third cavalry. The Odrysians themselves provided most of the cavalry, and after them the Getae. Of the infantry, the most warlike were the sword-bearing independents who came down from Rhodope; the rest followed as a mixed horde, most formidable for its numbers.

99 So they gathered at Doberus and made ready to descend over the heights into lower Macedonia, which Perdiccas ruled. For the Macedonians also include the Lyncestians, the Elimiotes, and other peoples of the uplands, which are allies and subjects of the lower Macedonians but have kingdoms of their own. The Macedonia along the sea, as it now is, was first acquired by Alexander, the father of Perdiccas, and his ancestors, who were originally Temenids from Argos. They became kings there after defeating and driving out the Pierians from Pieria, who later settled in Phagres and other places below Mount Pangaeus beyond the Strymon (and even now the land below Pangaeus toward the sea is called the Pierian Gulf), and the Bottiaeans from the region called Bottia, who now live on the borders of the Chalcidians. They also acquired a narrow strip of Paeonia along the river Axius, stretching down from the interior to Pella and the sea, and beyond the Axius they occupy as far as the Strymon the region called Mygdonia, after driving out the Edonians. They also drove out the Eordians from what is now called Eordia, most of whom were destroyed, though a small remnant of them is settled around Physca, and the Almopians from Almopia. These Macedonians also made themselves masters of other peoples, whose lands they still hold: Anthemus, Crestonia, Bisaltia, and much of Macedonia proper. The whole is called Macedonia, and Perdiccas son of Alexander was its king when Sitalces invaded.

100 These Macedonians, unable to defend themselves against so great an invading army, withdrew into the strongholds and fortified places that there were in the country. These were not many. Later Archelaus son of Perdiccas, when he became king, built those that are in the country now, cut straight roads, and in other respects organized the country for war, with horses, arms, and other equipment, better than all the eight kings before him put together. The Thracian army, setting out from Doberus, invaded first what had formerly been Philip’s kingdom. It took Idomene by storm, and Gortynia, Atalanta, and some other places came over to it by agreement out of friendship for Amyntas son of Philip, who was present. They besieged Europus but could not take it. Then Sitalces advanced into the rest of Macedonia, to the left of Pella and Cyrrhus. Beyond these, into Bottiaea and Pieria, they did not go, but ravaged Mygdonia, Crestonia, and Anthemus. The Macedonians did not even think of defending themselves with infantry, but sent for horsemen from their allies in the uplands, and wherever it seemed good, few against many, they charged into the Thracian army. Wherever they attacked, no one could stand up to them, good horsemen as they were and protected by breastplates; but being hemmed in by the mass of the enemy, they put themselves in danger against a horde many times their number, so that in the end they kept quiet, thinking they were not strong enough to risk an engagement with so many.

101 Sitalces opened discussions with Perdiccas about the matters for which he had made the expedition. Since the Athenians had not come with their ships, not believing that he would come, but had sent him gifts and envoys, he sent part of his army against the Chalcidians and Bottiaeans, shut them up inside their walls, and ravaged their land. While he was encamped in these parts, the Thessalians to the south, the Magnesians, and the other subjects of the Thessalians, and the Hellenes as far as Thermopylae, were afraid that the army might advance against them too, and made preparations. The Thracians beyond the Strymon to the north who held the plains, the Panaeans, Odomantians, Droans, and Dersaeans, all of them independent, were also afraid. It even gave rise to talk among the Hellenes who were enemies of the Athenians that the Thracians might be brought against them too by the Athenians, under the alliance. Meanwhile Sitalces overran and laid waste Chalcidice, Bottice, and Macedonia at the same time. But since nothing he had invaded for was being achieved, and his army had no food and was suffering from the winter, he was persuaded by Seuthes son of Sparadocus, his nephew and the most powerful man after himself, to leave quickly. Perdiccas had secretly won Seuthes over by promising to give him his sister in marriage, with money besides. Sitalces was persuaded, and after staying thirty days in all, eight of them among the Chalcidians, he withdrew with his army in haste to his own country. Later Perdiccas gave his sister Stratonice to Seuthes, as he had promised. So went the expedition of Sitalces.

102 In the same winter, after the Peloponnesian fleet had dispersed, the Athenians at Naupactus made an expedition under Phormio. They sailed along the coast to Astacus, landed, and marched into the interior of Acarnania with four hundred Athenian hoplites from the ships and four hundred Messenians. They expelled from Stratus, Coronta, and other places men who were thought to be unreliable, restored Cynes son of Theolytus to Coronta, and returned to their ships. For they did not think it possible to campaign in winter against Oeniadae, which alone of the Acarnanian towns had always been hostile. The river Achelous, flowing from Mount Pindus through Dolopia, the land of the Agraeans and the Amphilochians, and the Acarnanian plain, past the city of Stratus in its upper course, empties into the sea near Oeniadae and makes a marsh around their city, so that the water makes a winter campaign impossible. Most of the islands called the Echinades lie opposite Oeniadae, very close to the mouth of the Achelous, so that the river, which is large, is constantly silting them up, and some of the islands have already become part of the mainland; and it is likely that in no long time all of them will suffer the same fate. For the current is strong, abundant, and muddy, and the islands are close together and serve to bind the deposits of silt together, since they lie in staggered fashion, not in a line, and leave no straight channels for the water to reach the open sea. They are uninhabited and not large. It is said that when Alcmaeon son of Amphiaraus was wandering after the murder of his mother, Apollo gave him an oracle to live in this land. The god intimated that there would be no release from his terrors until he found and settled in a land that had not yet been seen by the sun, and was not even land, when he killed his mother, since all the rest of the earth was polluted for him. In his perplexity, so they say, he at last noticed this deposit of the Achelous, and he thought that enough land might have been piled up to support him in the long time he had been wandering since he killed his mother. He settled in the area around Oeniadae, became its ruler, and left the country its name from his son Acarnan. That is the story we have received about Alcmaeon.

103 The Athenians and Phormio set out from Acarnania and came to Naupactus, and at the beginning of spring they sailed back to Athens, bringing with them the free men among the prisoners from the sea battles, who were exchanged man for man, and the ships they had captured. So the winter ended, and with it the third year of this war, which Thucydides recorded.

Notes

1. 1. The traditional dating synchronizes three systems: the priestess of Hera at Argos, the eponymous ephor at Sparta, and the eponymous archon at Athens. The attack on Plataea fell in early spring 431 BC.

2. 2. The Lacedaemonians had demanded that Athens drive out “the curse of the goddess,” the pollution of the Alcmaeonid family, to which Pericles was related through his mother, for the killing of Cylon’s supporters (1.126–127).

3. 3. The Synoecia (“Feast of Union”), held in the month of Hecatombaeon, commemorated the unification of Attica under Theseus.

4. 4. In 446 BC.

5. 5. The eclipse of 3 August 431 BC.

6. 6. Pericles died in the autumn of 429 BC.

7. 7. The Sicilian expedition of 415–413 BC, narrated in Books 6 and 7.

8. 8. The manuscripts read “three,” which our text marks as corrupt: Athens in fact held out from the Sicilian disaster of 413 BC until its surrender in 404 BC. Editors have proposed other figures, such as “eight” or “ten.”

9. 9. The figure is doubtful in the manuscripts and may be corrupt.

10. 10. The morning rising of Arcturus, in mid-September.