Book 3

1 The following summer, when the grain was at its height, the Peloponnesians and their allies invaded Attica, led by Archidamus son of Zeuxidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians. They settled in and laid waste the land. The Athenian cavalry made attacks, as usual, wherever the ground allowed, and kept the great mass of the light-armed troops from venturing out beyond the main body of hoplites and doing damage near the city. The invaders stayed as long as their provisions lasted; then they withdrew and dispersed to their several cities.

2 Immediately after this invasion of the Peloponnesians, Lesbos, all except Methymna, revolted from Athens. The Lesbians had wanted to do so even before the war, but the Lacedaemonians would not take them in; and now they were forced to make even this revolt sooner than they had planned. They were waiting for the completion of the moles across their harbors, the building of their walls, and the construction of their ships, and for the arrival of what they were to get from the Pontus, archers and grain, and of other things they had sent for. But the people of Tenedos, who were at odds with them, and those of Methymna, and certain Mytilenians acting privately on account of faction, men who were proxeni of the Athenians (local citizens who represented Athens’ interests), turned informer to the Athenians: the Mytilenians, they said, were forcibly concentrating all Lesbos into Mytilene, and were hurrying on all their preparations for revolt together with the Lacedaemonians and the Boeotians, who were their kinsmen; and unless someone forestalled them at once, Athens would lose Lesbos.

3 The Athenians had been worn down by the plague and by the war, which had only just begun and was at its height, and they thought it a serious matter to take on Lesbos as an enemy as well, with its navy and its strength intact. At first they would not accept the charges, giving more weight to their wish that they were not true. But when they had sent envoys and could not persuade the Mytilenians to break up the concentration and the preparations, they took alarm and wanted to strike first. They sent off, without warning, forty ships that happened to be fitted out for a voyage around the Peloponnese; Cleippides son of Deinias commanded them, with two others. They had been told that there was a festival of Apollo Maloeis outside the city, which the Mytilenians celebrate in a body, and that there was hope, if they made haste, of falling on them by surprise. If the attempt succeeded, well and good; if not, the generals were to tell the Mytilenians to surrender their ships and pull down their walls, and if they did not comply, to make war. So the ships went off. The Athenians detained the ten Mytilenian triremes that happened to be with them as auxiliaries under the terms of the alliance, and put their crews under guard. But a man crossed from Athens to Euboea, went on foot to Geraestus, found a merchant ship putting out, took passage, and reached Mytilene on the third day from Athens with news of the expedition. The Mytilenians did not go out to the temple of Maloeis, and they barricaded the half-finished parts of their walls and harbors and kept guard.

4 Not long afterward the Athenians sailed in and saw how things stood. The generals delivered their orders, and when the Mytilenians would not listen, they began the war. The Mytilenians, unprepared and suddenly forced to fight, made a sortie with their ships a little way out from the harbor as if to give battle; then, chased back by the Attic ships, they at once began making proposals to the generals, wanting to get rid of the fleet for the present by some reasonable agreement if they could. The Athenian generals accepted, being afraid themselves that they were not strong enough to fight all Lesbos. An armistice was made, and the Mytilenians sent to Athens one of the informers, who already regretted what he had done, and others, in the hope of persuading the Athenians to withdraw the fleet on the ground that Mytilene intended no revolution. Meanwhile they also sent envoys to Lacedaemon in a trireme, slipping past the Athenian fleet, which was anchored at Malea to the north of the city; for they had no confidence that the mission to Athens would succeed. These envoys reached Lacedaemon after a hard passage over the open sea, and set to work to get help sent.

5 When the envoys came back from Athens having achieved nothing, the Mytilenians and the rest of Lesbos, except Methymna, went to war. The Methymnians had come to help the Athenians, and so had the people of Imbros and Lemnos and a few of the other allies. The Mytilenians made a sortie in full force against the Athenian camp, and a battle was fought in which they did not get the worse of it; yet they did not camp on the field, nor did they trust themselves, but withdrew. After that they kept quiet, unwilling to risk battle without the addition of forces from the Peloponnese and other resources. For Meleas, a Laconian, and Hermaeondas, a Theban, now came to them. These two had been sent out before the revolt, but being unable to arrive ahead of the Athenian expedition, they sailed in secretly in a trireme after the battle, and urged them to send another trireme and envoys back with them. The Mytilenians did so.

6 The Athenians took great heart from the inaction of the Mytilenians. They called in allies, who came much more quickly when they saw that nothing vigorous was coming from the Lesbians, and they moved their anchorage round to the south of the city and fortified two camps, one on each side of the city, and established blockades off both harbors. So they shut the Mytilenians off from the sea. On land, the Mytilenians and the other Lesbians, who had by now come to their aid, held everything except a small area around the camps, which the Athenians occupied; and Malea served the Athenians rather as a station for their ships and a market. That was how the war around Mytilene was being fought.

7 At about the same time this summer the Athenians also sent thirty ships around the Peloponnese under Asopius son of Phormio as general; the Acarnanians had asked them to send a son or kinsman of Phormio as their commander. The ships sailed along the coast of Laconia and ravaged the places by the sea. Then Asopius sent most of the ships back home and went on himself with twelve to Naupactus. Later he raised the Acarnanians in full force and marched against Oeniadae; his ships sailed up the Achelous while the army on land ravaged the country. When the place would not come over, he dismissed the land force, sailed himself to Leucas, and made a landing at Nericus; as he was withdrawing, he and part of his force were killed by the men of the district who rallied against him and by a small garrison. Afterward the Athenians sailed off, having recovered their dead from the Leucadians under a truce.

8 The Mytilenian envoys sent out on the first ship were told by the Lacedaemonians to appear at Olympia, so that the other allies too might hear them and deliberate. They went to Olympia. It was the Olympiad in which Dorieus of Rhodes won for the second time.¹ When after the festival they were given a hearing, they spoke as follows.

9 “Lacedaemonians and allies, we know the established rule among the Hellenes. Those who revolt in wartime and abandon their former alliance are welcomed by those who receive them for as long as they are useful; but they are thought worse of, as betrayers of their former friends. And this estimate is not unjust, when the rebels and those they break from are equal in sentiment and goodwill, matched in resources and power, and when no reasonable ground for the revolt exists. None of this held between us and the Athenians. Let no one think the worse of us, then, because we were honored by them in peace and are revolting from them in danger.

10 “For we shall speak first of justice and good faith, especially since we are asking for an alliance. We know that no friendship between private men is ever firm, and no partnership between cities comes to anything, unless they deal with one another in evident good faith and are alike in other ways as well; for it is in a difference of mind that differences in action take root. Our alliance with the Athenians began when you withdrew from the Persian War and they stayed on to finish the work that remained. But we became allies not of the Athenians for the enslavement of the Hellenes, but of the Hellenes for their liberation from the Mede. As long as they led on a footing of equality, we followed them with a will. But when we saw them relaxing their hostility to the Mede and pressing on with the enslavement of the allies, we were no longer without fear. The allies, unable to unite in self-defense because they had so many votes, were enslaved, all but ourselves and the Chians; we went on campaigning with them, independent and free in name. And we no longer trusted the Athenians as leaders, taking warning from what had already happened. It was not likely that they would subdue those they had brought into the treaty along with us, and not do the same to the rest if they were ever able.

11 “If we had all still been independent, we could have been surer that they would attempt no revolution against us. But since they held most of the allies in subjection and dealt with us alone as equals, they were naturally going to find it harder to bear that ours should be the only power that still stood up to theirs, when the majority had already given way, the more so as they grew stronger and we more isolated. Mutual fear is the only sure basis of an alliance; for the party that wants to break faith is held back by the thought that he would not have the advantage if he attacked. We were left independent for no other reason than that they thought they could best acquire their empire by fair-seeming words and by the methods of policy rather than of force. For one thing, they used us as evidence that those who had an equal vote would not join their campaigns against their will unless the people attacked were in the wrong. At the same time they brought the strongest states with them against the weaker ones first, and left the strongest for last, expecting to find them weaker once everything else had been stripped away. If they had begun with us, while all the allies still had their own strength and something to rally to, they would not have subdued them so easily. Our navy also gave them some fear that it might one day unite with yours or with someone else’s and become a danger to them. And partly too we survived by courting their people and whoever was leading it at the time. Yet we did not expect to last much longer, judging by the examples of how they had treated the others, if this war had not broken out.

12 “What sort of friendship was this, then, or what sure freedom, when we received each other against our true feelings? They courted us in war because they feared us; we did the same to them in peace. What in other cases goodwill does most to make trust firm, in ours fear supplied; it was dread more than friendship that held us in alliance; and whichever side first gained the confidence that safety gives was going to be the first to break faith. So if anyone thinks we did wrong in revolting first, because they were still delaying the harm they meant us, without our waiting to find out for certain whether any of it would happen, he does not judge rightly. If we had been able, on equal terms, to plot against them in return and to delay in return, what need would there have been for us, their equals, to be at their mercy? But since the power to attack was always theirs, the power to defend ourselves in advance must be ours.

13 “Such, Lacedaemonians and allies, were the grounds and grievances for which we revolted. They are clear enough for those who hear them to see that we acted reasonably, and strong enough to frighten us and turn us toward some means of safety. We wanted to do this long ago, when in time of peace we sent to you about revolting, and we were prevented because you would not take us in. Now, when the Boeotians invited us, we answered at once. We thought we were making a double break: from the Hellenes, so as not to join the Athenians in doing them harm but to join in freeing them; and from the Athenians, so as not to be destroyed by them later but to act first. Our revolt, however, has come sooner than we meant, and unprepared; which is all the more reason for you to accept us as allies and to send help quickly, so that you may be seen protecting those you ought to protect and at the same stroke harming your enemies. There has never been such an opportunity. The Athenians have been ruined by the plague and by the expense of money; some of their ships are cruising round your coasts, and others are posted against us. So they are not likely to have any ships to spare if you invade a second time this summer by sea and land together. Either they will not resist you when you sail against them, or they will withdraw from both places. And let no one think that he will be running a risk of his own for a country that is not his. The man who thinks Lesbos is far away will find its usefulness close at hand. For the war will not be decided in Attica, as some suppose, but in the places from which Attica draws its strength. Their revenue comes from the allies, and it will be still greater if they subdue us; for no one else will revolt, our resources will be added to theirs, and we would suffer worse things than those who were enslaved before us. But if you help us with a will, you will gain a city that has a great navy, the thing you most need; you will more easily bring down the Athenians by drawing their allies away from them, for everyone will come over to you more boldly; and you will escape the charge you have borne of not helping those who revolt. If you are seen as liberators, your mastery in the war will be more secure.

14 “Respect, then, the hopes the Hellenes have placed in you, and respect Olympian Zeus, in whose sanctuary we stand as good as suppliants. Become allies of the Mytilenians and defend them. Do not abandon us. The risk to our lives is ours alone; but the benefit if we succeed will be shared by all, and the harm still more widely shared if we fail because you would not listen. Be the men the Hellenes think you are and our fear requires you to be.”

15 So the Mytilenians spoke. When the Lacedaemonians and their allies had heard them, they accepted their arguments and made the Lesbians allies. They told the allies who were present to go quickly to the Isthmus with two-thirds of their forces for the invasion of Attica, and they themselves arrived there first and began preparing hauling machines at the Isthmus for the ships, meaning to carry them across from Corinth to the sea on the Athens side and to attack by sea and land together. The Lacedaemonians went about this zealously; but the other allies were slow in gathering, for they were busy bringing in their harvest and were sick of campaigning.

16 The Athenians saw that the enemy were making these preparations because they took Athens for weak, and they wanted to show that this judgment was wrong and that they could easily beat off an attack from the Peloponnese without moving the fleet off Lesbos. They manned a hundred ships, going on board themselves, citizens of every class except the horsemen and the five-hundred-bushel men, together with the resident aliens; and they put out along the Isthmus, making a display of their strength and landing in the Peloponnese wherever they pleased. When the Lacedaemonians saw how far things had gone against their reckoning, they concluded that what the Lesbians had told them was untrue. They thought the scheme impracticable, since their allies had not come in, and they were also receiving word that the thirty Athenian ships around the Peloponnese were ravaging the lands of their Perioeci; so they went home. Later, however, they began preparing a fleet to send to Lesbos, ordered a total of forty ships from the cities, and appointed Alcidas as admiral to sail with it. The Athenians too withdrew with their hundred ships once they saw the Lacedaemonians go.

17 [At the time when this fleet was at sea, Athens had about the largest number of ships in active service, and of the finest, that she ever had at one time, though at the beginning of the war she had as many or even more.² A hundred guarded Attica, Euboea, and Salamis, and another hundred were around the Peloponnese, not counting those at Potidaea and in other places, so that in a single summer the total came to two hundred and fifty. This, along with Potidaea, was what chiefly drained the treasury. At Potidaea the hoplites served for two drachmas a day (each man drew a drachma for himself and one for his servant): there were 3,000 at first, and no fewer than that stayed through the whole siege, besides 1,600 with Phormio, who left before the end; and all the ships drew the same pay. That was how the money was drained away at first, and that was the largest number of ships ever manned.]

18 At the same time as the Lacedaemonians were at the Isthmus, the Mytilenians and their auxiliaries marched by land against Methymna, expecting it to be betrayed to them. They attacked the city, but when things did not go as they had expected, they went off to Antissa, Pyrrha, and Eresus, put matters in those cities on a firmer footing, strengthened their walls, and returned home in haste. When they had gone, the Methymnians in turn marched against Antissa; but a sortie was made, and they were beaten by the Antissaeans and the auxiliaries, many were killed, and the rest withdrew in haste. When the Athenians learned of this, that the Mytilenians were masters of the land and that their own soldiers were not enough to hold them in, they sent Paches son of Epicurus as general, with a thousand of their own hoplites, at about the beginning of autumn. These men rowed their own ships out, and when they arrived they enclosed Mytilene all the way round with a single wall, with forts built into it at some of the strong points. Mytilene was now shut in by force on both sides, by land and by sea; and the winter was beginning.

19 The Athenians needed more money for the siege, and for the first time they themselves paid in a property tax of two hundred talents. They also sent out twelve ships to collect money from the allies, with Lysicles and four others as generals. He collected money in various places and sailed round, and in Caria he marched inland from Myus across the plain of the Maeander as far as the hill of Sandius; there the Carians and the Anaeitans attacked, and he and many of the rest of his force were killed.

20 The same winter the Plataeans, who were still besieged by the Peloponnesians and Boeotians, were hard pressed as their grain gave out; there was no hope of relief from Athens and no other means of rescue in sight. So they and the Athenians who were besieged with them made a plan. At first they meant all to go out and get over the enemy’s walls, if they could force a way. The attempt was proposed to them by Theaenetus son of Tolmides, a soothsayer, and Eupompides son of Daimachus, who was also one of their generals. Then half of them somehow lost heart, thinking the danger too great; but about 220 held to the plan of breaking out, of their own free will, in the following way. They made ladders equal in height to the enemy’s wall. They calculated the height by the courses of bricks, at a point where the wall on their side happened not to be plastered over. Many men counted the courses at once; some were bound to miss, but most would hit on the true count, especially since they counted many times and were not far off, but could easily see the stretch of wall they wanted. So they worked out the measurement for the ladders, estimating it from the thickness of a brick.

21 The Peloponnesian wall was built like this. It had two circuits, one facing Plataea and one facing out, in case anyone should attack from Athens; the two circuits were about sixteen feet apart. The space between, the sixteen feet, had been built up into quarters allotted to the guards, and these were continuous, so that it looked like one thick wall with battlements on both sides. At every tenth battlement there were large towers as wide as the wall, reaching to both its inner and its outer face, so that there was no way past a tower; the men went through the middle of them. On nights of stormy, wet weather they would leave the battlements and keep watch from the towers, which were not far apart and were roofed over. Such was the wall that encircled the Plataeans.

22 When everything was ready, they waited for a night of storm, with rain and wind and no moon, and went out. They were led by the men who had proposed the attempt. First they crossed the ditch that ran around their city; then they reached the enemy’s wall unnoticed by the guards, who could not see them ahead in the darkness and could not hear the sound of their approach, since the wind drowned it with its own noise. They also kept well apart as they went, so that their weapons would not knock against one another and give them away. They were lightly equipped and had only the left foot shod, to keep from slipping in the mud. They came up to the battlements at a point between two towers, knowing that these were unmanned. First came the men carrying the ladders, and they set them up; then twelve light-armed men with daggers and breastplates went up, led by Ammeas son of Coroebus, who was the first to climb. His followers came up after him, six against each of the two towers. Behind them came other light-armed men with short spears, while still others behind them carried their shields, so that they could climb more easily, and were to hand the shields over when they were at close quarters with the enemy. When a good number of them were up, the guards in the towers heard them; for one of the Plataeans, catching hold of the battlements, knocked off a tile, which made a crash as it fell. At once there was a shout, and the army rushed to the wall. They did not know what the danger was, since the night was dark and stormy; and at the same time the Plataeans left in the city came out and attacked the Peloponnesian wall on the side opposite to where their men were crossing, so that the enemy would pay as little attention as possible to them. So the besiegers were in confusion and stayed at their posts, and no one dared leave his own station to help; they were at a loss to guess what was happening. Their three hundred, who had been assigned to go wherever help was needed, went outside the wall toward the shouting. Fire signals warning of the enemy were raised toward Thebes. But the Plataeans in the city also raised many fire signals from their wall, prepared beforehand for this very purpose, so that the enemy’s signals would be unclear and the Thebans, taking what was happening for something other than it was, would not come to help before the men who had gone out escaped and reached safety.

23 Meanwhile, as for the Plataeans who were crossing: when the first of them had got up and had taken both towers, killing the guards, they posted themselves in the passageways of the towers and kept anyone from coming through to help. They set ladders against the towers from the wall and sent more men up, and those on the towers kept off the men coming to help, both below and above, with missiles, while the main body set up many ladders at once, pushed down the battlements, and went over between the towers. As each man got across, he took his stand on the edge of the ditch, and from there they shot arrows and threw javelins at anyone coming along the wall to block the crossing. When they were all over, the men on the towers came down, the last of them with difficulty, and made for the ditch; and at that moment the three hundred came at them carrying torches. The Plataeans, standing in the dark on the edge of the ditch, could see them better, and shot arrows and hurled javelins at their exposed flanks, while they themselves, in the dark, were harder to see because of the torches. So even the last of the Plataeans got across the ditch in time, though with difficulty and by main force. Ice had formed in it, not firm enough to walk on, but watery, as it is with an east wind; and the night, with snow falling in that wind, had put a great deal of water in the ditch, so that they could barely keep their heads above it as they crossed. In fact it was chiefly the severity of the storm that made their escape possible.

24 Starting from the ditch, the Plataeans went in a body along the road that leads to Thebes, keeping the shrine of the hero Androcrates on their right. They reckoned that the enemy would least suspect them of taking this road, the one toward their enemies; and they could see the Peloponnesians with torches pursuing along the road to Cithaeron and Dryoscephalae, the one that leads to Athens. For six or seven stades the Plataeans went along the Thebes road; then they turned off onto the road leading to the mountains, toward Erythrae and Hysiae, and reaching the hills they escaped to Athens, 212 men out of a larger number. For some of them had turned back to the city before crossing, and one, an archer, was captured at the outer ditch. The Peloponnesians gave up the pursuit and went back to their posts. The Plataeans in the city knew nothing of what had happened, and since those who had turned back reported that no one was left alive, they sent out a herald at daybreak to ask for a truce to recover the dead; when they learned the truth, they stopped. That was how these Plataeans got over the wall and saved themselves.

25 At the end of the same winter, Salaethus the Lacedaemonian was sent out from Lacedaemon to Mytilene in a trireme. He sailed to Pyrrha, went on from there by land along a ravine where the siege wall could be crossed, got into Mytilene unnoticed, and told the presiding magistrates that there would be an invasion of Attica and that at the same time the forty ships that were to help them would arrive; he himself had been sent ahead to tell them this and also to take charge of affairs generally. The Mytilenians took heart and were less inclined to come to terms with the Athenians. So the winter ended, and with it the fourth year of this war, which Thucydides recorded.

26 The following summer the Peloponnesians sent off the forty-two ships to Mytilene under the command of Alcidas, their admiral, and then they and their allies invaded Attica, so that the Athenians, harassed on both sides, would be less able to send help against the ships sailing for Mytilene. The leader of this invasion was Cleomenes, acting for Pausanias son of Pleistoanax, who was king but still a minor; Cleomenes was his father’s brother. They ravaged whatever had grown up again in the parts of Attica already laid waste and whatever had been passed over in the earlier invasions. This invasion was the hardest on the Athenians after the second. For they stayed on, always waiting to hear from Lesbos of some achievement by the fleet, which they supposed had by now crossed over, and they went over most of the country, cutting as they went. When nothing they expected came about and their grain had run out, they withdrew and dispersed to their cities.

27 Meanwhile the Mytilenians, since the ships had not come from the Peloponnese but were taking their time, and since their grain had run out, were forced to come to terms with the Athenians, for the following reason. Salaethus himself no longer expected the ships, and he armed the common people, who had been light-armed before, intending to make a sortie against the Athenians. But once the people had arms, they no longer obeyed the authorities. They gathered in groups and told the men of power either to bring the grain out into the open and share it among everyone, or they would come to terms with the Athenians on their own and hand over the city.

28 Those in charge of affairs saw that they could not prevent this, and that they would be in danger if they were left out of the agreement. So they made a general settlement with Paches and the army: the Athenians were to be free to decide whatever they wished about the Mytilenians, and the Mytilenians were to admit the army into the city and send an embassy to Athens on their own behalf; until the envoys returned, Paches was not to imprison, enslave, or kill any Mytilenian. That was the agreement. But those Mytilenians who had been most deeply involved with the Lacedaemonians were terrified, and when the army came in they could not hold out, but took refuge at the altars all the same. Paches raised them up, promising to do them no harm, and put them away on Tenedos until the Athenians should come to some decision. He also sent triremes to Antissa and took it over, and arranged other military matters as he thought best.

29 The Peloponnesians in the forty ships, who should have arrived quickly, wasted time sailing around the Peloponnese itself and went slowly on the rest of the voyage. They escaped the notice of the Athenians at home until they reached Delos; but when they put in from there at Icarus and Myconus, they first learned that Mytilene had fallen. Wanting to know for certain, they sailed to Embatum in the territory of Erythrae; it was about seven days after Mytilene had fallen when they put in at Embatum. When they had learned the truth, they discussed what to do in the circumstances, and Teutiaplus, a man of Elis, spoke to them as follows.

30 “Alcidas, and you Peloponnesians who are here as commanders of the force: I think we should sail against Mytilene just as we are, before anyone hears of us. In all likelihood we shall find a great deal unguarded, as you would expect with men who have only lately taken a city. This is especially true by sea, where they do not expect any enemy to come at them and where our strength happens chiefly to lie. Their land forces too are probably scattered rather carelessly among the houses, as victors would be. So if we fell on them suddenly and by night, I hope that with the help of those inside, if anyone well disposed to us is left, we could take control of the situation. Let us not shrink from the risk. Let us bear in mind that this is exactly what the surprises of war consist of; and the general who guards against them in himself, and sees them in the enemy and attacks, will most often succeed.”

31 That was all he said, and he did not persuade Alcidas. Some others, exiles from Ionia, and the Lesbians who were sailing with the fleet urged him, since he was afraid of this risk, to seize one of the cities in Ionia or Cyme in Aeolis. With a city as a base, they could bring Ionia to revolt; there was hope of this, since no one had been unhappy to see them come. They would take away this, the Athenians’ greatest source of revenue, and at the same time, if the Athenians blockaded them, it would cost Athens money. They thought they could also persuade Pissuthnes to join the war.³ But Alcidas would not accept this either. His chief thought, since he was too late for Mytilene, was to get back to the Peloponnese as quickly as possible.

32 He put out from Embatum and sailed along the coast. Putting in at Myonnesus, in the territory of Teos, he slaughtered most of the prisoners he had taken on the voyage. When he anchored at Ephesus, envoys came to him from the Samians of Anaea and told him that this was a poor way to liberate Hellas, killing men who had not raised a hand against him and were not enemies but allies of the Athenians by necessity; if he did not stop, he would win few of his enemies over to friendship and would turn far more of his friends into enemies. He was persuaded, and he let go all the Chians he still held and some of the others. For when people saw his ships they did not run away; they came up to them, taking them for Attic ships, and had not the slightest expectation that, while the Athenians commanded the sea, Peloponnesian ships would ever cross over to Ionia.

33 From Ephesus Alcidas sailed in haste and made his escape; for he had been sighted, while still at anchor off Clarus, by the Salaminia and the Paralus, the Athenian state ships, which happened to be on a voyage from Athens. Fearing pursuit, he sailed across the open sea, determined not to touch land willingly anywhere but in the Peloponnese. News of him came to Paches and the Athenians from the territory of Erythrae, and indeed from every quarter. For Ionia was unwalled, and there was great fear that the Peloponnesians, sailing along the coast, might fall on the cities and sack them, even if they did not mean to stay. And the Paralus and the Salaminia brought word themselves of having seen him at Clarus. Paches took up the pursuit in haste and chased him as far as the island of Patmos; but when it was clear that he could no longer be overtaken, he turned back. Since he had not come upon the enemy ships in the open sea, he counted it a gain that they had not been caught anywhere near the coast and forced to make camp, so that he would have had to guard and blockade them.

34 On his way back along the coast he put in at Notium, the port of Colophon. The Colophonians had settled there after the upper city was taken by Itamanes and the barbarians, who had been called in by one party in a civil conflict; the city had been taken at about the time of the second Peloponnesian invasion of Attica. The refugees who had settled at Notium fell into faction again. One side had brought in auxiliaries, Arcadians and barbarians, from Pissuthnes and held them in a walled-off quarter, and the Colophonians of the upper city who had gone over to the Mede had joined them there and were running the city with them. The other side had slipped away from them, and these exiles now brought in Paches. He invited Hippias, the commander of the Arcadians in the walled quarter, to a parley, on the understanding that if he said nothing acceptable, Paches would put him back inside the fortification safe and sound. Hippias came out to him; Paches kept him under guard, though not in chains, and suddenly attacked the fortification while the defenders were off their guard, took it, and killed the Arcadians and all the barbarians who were inside. Then he took Hippias back in, as he had agreed, and as soon as he was inside, seized him and had him shot down with arrows. He handed Notium over to the Colophonians, except for those who had sided with the Mede. Later the Athenians sent out founders and resettled Notium under their own laws, gathering in all the Colophonians from the cities wherever any were to be found.

35 When Paches returned to Mytilene, he reduced Pyrrha and Eresus. He found Salaethus the Lacedaemonian hiding in the city, captured him, and sent him off to Athens, together with the Mytilenians he had put away on Tenedos and anyone else he thought responsible for the revolt. He also sent away the greater part of his army, and stayed on with the rest to settle affairs at Mytilene and in the rest of Lesbos as he thought best.

36 When the men and Salaethus arrived, the Athenians at once put Salaethus to death, although he offered, among other things, to get the Peloponnesians to withdraw from Plataea, which was still under siege. About the other men they held a debate, and in their anger they decided to put to death not only those who were there but all the grown men of Mytilene, and to enslave the women and children. They charged against them the revolt in general, because they had made it without being subjects like the others; and it added not a little to their fury that Peloponnesian ships had dared to risk the voyage to Ionia to help them, for this made the revolt seem the work of long premeditation. So they sent a trireme to Paches to announce what they had decided, with orders to put the Mytilenians to death at once. The next day there was a sudden change of heart, and they began to reflect that the decision they had made was savage and monstrous, to destroy a whole city rather than those who were guilty. When the Mytilenian envoys who were present and their Athenian supporters saw this, they got the authorities to put the question again; and they persuaded them the more easily because the authorities too could see that most of the citizens wanted someone to give them a chance to reconsider. An assembly was called at once. Various opinions were expressed on each side, and Cleon son of Cleaenetus,⁴ who had carried the earlier motion to put them to death, the most violent of the citizens in general and at that time by far the most persuasive with the people, came forward again and spoke as follows.

37 “I have often before now, on other occasions, seen that a democracy is incapable of ruling others, but never more clearly than in your present change of heart about the Mytilenians. Because your daily life among yourselves is free from fear and intrigue, you take the same attitude toward your allies. You do not see that whenever you make a mistake because their arguments have persuaded you, or give way out of pity, your weakness is dangerous to you and wins you no gratitude from them. You do not consider that your empire is a tyranny, imposed on people who plot against you and are ruled against their will; who obey you not because of any favors you may do them to your own harm, but because of the superiority you win by strength rather than by their goodwill. The most dreadful thing of all is if nothing we decide is ever to stand firm, and if we will not recognize that a city with worse laws that are never changed is stronger than one with good laws that have no force; that ignorance joined with restraint is more useful than cleverness joined with license; and that ordinary people, compared with the more intelligent, generally run their cities better. The intelligent want to appear wiser than the laws and to win every argument in public debate, as though there were no weightier matters on which to show their judgment; and this is how they so often bring their cities down. The others, distrusting their own intelligence, are content to be less learned than the laws and less able to pick holes in the speech of a good speaker; and being impartial judges rather than competitors, they usually get things right. That, then, is how we too should act, and not be carried away by cleverness and contests of wit into giving you, the people, advice against our own judgment.

38 “I, for my part, hold the same opinion as before. I am amazed at those who have brought the question of the Mytilenians up again and so caused delay, which works in favor of the wrongdoers. For the victim then goes after the offender with his anger dulled, whereas the punishment that follows closest on the injury is the one that matches it best and exacts the fullest vengeance. And I wonder, too, who will speak against me and undertake to show that the crimes of the Mytilenians are good for us and that our misfortunes are harmful to our allies. Clearly he will either rely on his eloquence and strive to prove that what has been thoroughly resolved has not been resolved at all, or he will be moved by gain to work up some plausible speech and try to lead you astray. In contests like these the city gives the prizes to others and takes the dangers on itself. You are to blame, for you stage these contests badly. You have made a habit of being spectators of words and listeners to deeds. Whether future deeds can be done, you judge from those who speak well about them; and of deeds already done, you do not trust the fact you saw with your own eyes more than what you heard, but believe those who find fine-sounding fault with them. You are the best at being deceived by a novel argument and the least willing to follow an approved one; slaves to every new paradox, scorners of the familiar. Each of you wishes above all to be able to speak himself; failing that, you compete with the speakers so as not to seem to lag behind their thought, applauding a clever point before it is out, quick to anticipate what is said and slow to foresee where it will lead. You seek, so to speak, some world other than the one we live in, and you do not think clearly enough even about what is in front of you. In short, you are overcome by the pleasure of listening and are more like an audience sitting at the feet of sophists than men deliberating about a city.

39 “It is from all this that I am trying to turn you away, and I tell you that the Mytilenians have done you more wrong than any single city ever has. I can make allowance for those who revolt because they cannot bear your rule, or because the enemy forces them to. But these men held an island with walls; they feared our enemies only by sea, and even there they were not without protection, with a force of triremes of their own; they lived independent, and we honored them above all others. What have men like these done, if not conspired against us and risen up, rather than revolted? For revolt is what people do who are treated with violence. They have tried to destroy us by taking their stand with our bitterest enemies. And that is worse than if they had made war on us by building up a power of their own. The disasters of their neighbors, who had already revolted and been subdued, were no lesson to them; nor did their present prosperity make them hesitate to run into danger. Bold toward the future, with hopes beyond their power though short of their desires, they went to war, deciding to put might before right. For at the moment when they thought they would come out on top, they attacked us, though they had suffered no wrong. It is usual for cities that come to great prosperity most suddenly and unexpectedly to turn to insolence; and in general success is safer for men when it comes according to calculation than when it comes against expectation; they find it easier, you might say, to fight off adversity than to preserve prosperity. We ought never to have given the Mytilenians any more honor than the rest, and then they would not have gone so far in their insolence; for it is human nature anyway to despise those who court us and to admire those who will not give way. Let them be punished now as their crime deserves. Do not lay the blame on the few and let the people off. All of them alike attacked you, though they could have turned to us and would now be back in their city. Instead they thought the risk they ran with the few the safer one and joined in the revolt. And consider your allies. If you impose the same penalties on those who are forced to revolt by the enemy and on those who revolt of their own will, who do you think will not revolt on the slightest pretext, when success means freedom and failure means nothing irreparable? We, meanwhile, shall have to risk our money and our lives against each city in turn. If we succeed, we recover a ruined city and are deprived for the future of its revenue, which is our strength; if we fail, we shall have fresh enemies in addition to those we have, and the time we should spend resisting our present enemies we shall spend fighting our own allies.

40 “We must not, then, hold out any hope, whether secured by eloquence or bought with money, that they will be pardoned because their error was only human. They did us no harm unwillingly; they plotted against us knowingly; and only what is involuntary deserves pardon. So I, both then at the first and now, insist that you should not reverse your earlier decision, nor be led into error by the three things most fatal to an empire: pity, the pleasure of speeches, and leniency. Mercy is rightly given in return to those who are like us, not to those who will show none in return and who are, of necessity, our enemies forever. The orators who delight us with their speeches will have other, lesser contests to show off in, and not one in which the city, for a brief pleasure, pays a heavy penalty, while they themselves get handsome rewards for their handsome speaking. And leniency is better shown to those who are going to be our friends in future than to those who remain just as they were and no less our enemies. To sum up in a word: if you take my advice, you will do what is just toward the Mytilenians and at the same time what is expedient; if you decide otherwise, you will not win their gratitude, but you will rather pass sentence on yourselves. For if they were right to revolt, you must be wrong to rule. But if, right or wrong, you still claim to rule, then these people too must be punished, against equity if need be, for your own advantage; or else you must give up your empire and play the honest man from a position of safety. Resolve to repay them with the same penalty, and do not show yourselves, who escaped their plot, less sensitive than those who laid it. Think what they would likely have done to you if they had won, especially since they were the aggressors. It is those who harm another without cause who pursue him to the end and destroy him, seeing the danger of an enemy who survives; for a man who has suffered for no good reason is more dangerous if he escapes than an enemy on equal terms. Do not, then, be traitors to yourselves. Put yourselves as nearly as you can in the moment of suffering; remember how you would have given anything to have them in your power; and pay them back now. Do not grow soft at the sight of their present plight, and do not forget the danger that so lately hung over you. Punish them as they deserve, and make of them a clear example to the other allies that anyone who revolts will be punished with death. Once they understand this, you will less often have to neglect your enemies to fight your own allies.”

41 That was Cleon’s speech. After him Diodotus son of Eucrates, who in the earlier assembly too had been the chief speaker against putting the Mytilenians to death, came forward on this occasion also and spoke as follows.

42 “I do not blame those who have put the question of the Mytilenians before us again, nor do I approve of those who object to repeated deliberation on matters of the greatest importance. I think the two things most opposed to good counsel are haste and anger; the one usually goes with folly, the other with lack of education and narrowness of mind. And whoever insists that words are not the teachers of action is either a fool or has some private interest at stake. A fool, if he thinks there is any other way of explaining what lies in the future and is not yet clear; self-interested, if he wants to persuade you to something shameful and, not thinking he could speak well in a bad cause, thinks he can slander well and so intimidate both his opponents and his audience. Worst of all are those who also accuse a speaker beforehand of making a display for money. If they charged him only with ignorance, a speaker who failed to persuade would go away thought more foolish than dishonest; but when dishonesty is alleged, he is suspected if he succeeds, and if he fails he is thought not only a fool but dishonest too. The city gains nothing by this, for fear robs it of its advisers. It would do best of all if citizens like these had no power of speech, for then the people would least often be persuaded into error. The good citizen ought not to frighten his opponents but to show himself the better speaker on equal terms; and the wise city should not add new honor to the man who most often gives good advice, nor yet diminish the honor he already has; and the man whose proposal fails should not only not be punished but not even be disgraced. In that way the successful speaker would be least tempted to say anything against his convictions and to please his hearers in the hope of still higher honors, and the unsuccessful one would not strive by the same means, by pleasing them, to win over the people himself.

43 “We do the opposite. Worse still, if a man is so much as suspected of speaking for his own profit, even though what he says is the best advice, we begrudge him the profit we only imagine he will make, and deprive the city of a benefit it plainly would have had. It has come to the point that good advice given straightforwardly is no less suspect than bad, so that the man who wants to carry the most dangerous measures must win the people over by deceit, and the man who gives the better advice must lie to be believed. Ours is the only city where, because of all this cleverness, no one can do good openly without deceiving; for whoever openly offers you something good is suspected of gaining something for himself in secret. Yet on matters of the greatest importance, and in a situation like this, we who advise you must be expected to look somewhat further ahead than you, who give things only a brief consideration; especially since we are accountable for our advice, while you are not accountable for your listening. If the man who gave the advice and the men who followed it suffered alike, you would judge more prudently. As it is, whenever you meet with disaster, you give way to the anger of the moment and punish the single judgment of the man who persuaded you, and not your own, though there were many of you who shared in the mistake.

44 “I have come forward neither to speak in defense of the Mytilenians nor to accuse them. If we are sensible, the question before us is not their guilt but our own good judgment. Even if I prove them utterly guilty, I shall not on that account tell you to put them to death, unless it is to our advantage; and even if they deserve some pardon, I shall not tell you to pardon them, if that does not appear good for the city. I think we are deliberating about the future rather than the present. Cleon insists above all that it will be to our advantage in future to impose death as the penalty, so that there will be fewer revolts; and I, who equally insist on what is good for the future, hold the opposite view. I ask you not to reject the usefulness of my argument for the attractiveness of his. His argument is the more just one, and in your present anger against the Mytilenians it may well win you over. But we are not in a court of law with them, where we would need to consider what is just; we are deliberating about them, and how they may be made useful to us.

45 “Now in cities the death penalty has been laid down for many offenses, and those not as great as this one but lesser; yet men are carried away by hope and take the risk, and no one has ever yet entered into danger convinced that his plot would fail. What city that revolted ever made the attempt believing that its resources, its own or those its allies would bring, were too weak for it? All men, in private and in public, are by nature disposed to do wrong, and there is no law that will keep them from it. Men have gone through the whole list of penalties, adding to them, in the hope of suffering less at the hands of wrongdoers. It is likely that in ancient times the penalties for the greatest crimes were milder, and that as they were disregarded, they were in time mostly raised to death; and even this is disregarded. Either, then, some fear more terrible than this must be found, or this at least is no restraint. Poverty gives daring through necessity; abundance gives greed for more through insolence and pride; and the other conditions of life, as each of them is gripped by some incurable and overmastering power, lead men on into danger through their passions. Hope and desire are everywhere, desire leading and hope following, desire devising the plan and hope suggesting that fortune will provide; they do the most harm, and, being unseen, they are stronger than the dangers that are seen. Fortune too contributes no less to the excitement. For she sometimes appears unexpectedly and leads men on to take risks even when their means are inferior; and this is true of cities no less than of individuals, inasmuch as the stakes are the highest, freedom or rule over others, and each man, carried along with all the rest, irrationally overrates his own strength. In short, it is impossible, and the mark of great simplicity, for anyone to suppose that when human nature is bent on doing something, it can be turned aside by force of law or by any other terror.

46 “We must not, therefore, make a bad decision by trusting in the death penalty as a safeguard, nor leave rebels without hope, as though there would be no chance to repent and to put an end to their error as soon as possible. Consider: as things are now, if a city has revolted and sees that it cannot succeed, it may come to terms while it is still able to pay the costs and to keep up its tribute in future. But in the other case, what city do you think will not prepare better than now and hold out under siege to the last, if it makes no difference whether it comes to terms late or soon? And how is it not a loss to us to spend money sitting before a city because it will not surrender, and, if we take it, to get back a ruined city and lose its revenue for the future? It is by that revenue that we are strong against our enemies. So we must not be strict judges of the offenders to our own harm. We must rather see how, by moderate punishment, we can keep the cities in future in a condition to be useful to us financially; and we should seek our security not in the severity of the laws but in the care we take in our actions. At present we do the opposite. When a free people, ruled by force, has naturally revolted to win its independence and we have subdued it, we think we must take a harsh revenge. But it is not when free men revolt that we should punish them severely; we should watch them severely before they revolt, and forestall them so that the idea never even enters their minds; and when we have subdued them, we should lay the blame on as few of them as possible.

47 “Consider too how great a mistake you would make in this respect if you took Cleon’s advice. As things are, the people in all the cities are well disposed to you. Either they do not join the few in revolting, or, if they are forced to, they are at once the enemies of those who brought the revolt about; and when you go to war, you have the masses of the rebel city on your side. But if you destroy the people of Mytilene, who took no part in the revolt and who, as soon as they got hold of arms, willingly handed over the city, you will first of all commit a crime by killing your benefactors, and you will then give the men of power everywhere what they most want. For when they bring a city to revolt, they will at once have the people on their side, since you will have shown in advance that the same punishment is laid down for the guilty and the innocent alike. On the contrary, even if they were guilty, we should pretend not to know it, so that the only class still allied to us may not become our enemy. And I consider it much more useful for keeping our empire that we should suffer wrong willingly than that we should justly destroy those whom we ought not to destroy. As for Cleon’s idea that in this punishment justice and advantage are one and the same, it turns out that the two cannot both be had at once.

48 “Recognize, then, that this is the better course. Do not give too much weight to pity or to leniency, for I too would not have you be swayed by them; but on the merits of the advice itself, take my counsel: judge at your leisure those Mytilenians whom Paches sent here as guilty, and let the rest live in their city. This is good for the future and alarming to our enemies already. For whoever deliberates well is stronger against his opponents than one who goes at them with mere force and folly.”

49 That was what Diodotus said. When these opinions, so directly opposed to each other, had been expressed, the Athenians, despite their change of heart, were still divided, and in the show of hands the two sides were nearly equal; but the motion of Diodotus carried. At once they sent off a second trireme in all haste, so that they would not find the city destroyed because the first had arrived ahead of it; it had about a day and a night’s start. The Mytilenian envoys provided wine and barley meal for the ship and promised great rewards if they got there first, and the voyage was made with such haste that the men ate barley meal kneaded with wine and oil as they rowed, and slept and rowed by turns. As luck would have it, there was no wind against them; and since the first ship was in no hurry on its monstrous errand, while the second was pressing on in the way described, the first arrived only so far ahead that Paches had read the decree and was about to carry out what had been decided, when the second put in after it and prevented the slaughter. By so narrow a margin did Mytilene escape its danger.

50 The other men, whom Paches had sent to Athens as the ones most responsible for the revolt, the Athenians put to death on Cleon’s motion; there were a little more than a thousand of them.⁵ They pulled down the walls of Mytilene and took over its ships. Afterward they did not impose tribute on the Lesbians, but divided the land, except that of Methymna, into 3,000 lots. Three hundred they set aside as sacred to the gods, and for the rest they sent out men of their own, chosen by lot, as lot-holders. The Lesbians agreed to pay them two minas a year for each lot and worked the land themselves. The Athenians also took over the towns on the mainland that the Mytilenians had controlled, and these were afterward subject to Athens. That was how things went on Lesbos.

51 In the same summer, after the capture of Lesbos, the Athenians under the command of Nicias son of Niceratus made an expedition against the island of Minoa, which lies off Megara. The Megarians had built a tower on it and used it as a fort. Nicias wanted the Athenians to keep their watch from there, at closer range, and not from Budorum and Salamis; he wanted to stop the Peloponnesians from using it as a base to put out unobserved, as had happened before, with triremes and by sending out privateers, and at the same time to stop anything from sailing in to the Megarians. So first he took two towers projecting from Nisaea, using siege engines from the sea, and cleared the way into the channel between the island and the mainland. Then he walled off the side facing the mainland as well, where help could reach the island across a bridge over the shallows, for the island is not far from the mainland. When this had been completed in a few days, he built a fort on the island too, left a garrison there, and withdrew with his army.

52 At about the same time this summer the Plataeans, who had no more grain and could no longer endure the siege, came to terms with the Peloponnesians in the following way. The Peloponnesians were attacking their wall, and the Plataeans were unable to defend it. The Lacedaemonian commander saw how weak they were, but he did not want to take the city by force. He had instructions from Lacedaemon to this effect: if a treaty should ever be made with the Athenians, and the two sides agreed to give back the places each had taken in war, Plataea was not to be among those given back, on the ground that its people had come over of their own accord. So he sent them a herald to ask whether they were willing to surrender their city voluntarily to the Lacedaemonians and accept them as judges; the guilty would be punished, but no one against justice. That was what the herald said, and the Plataeans, who were now at their weakest, surrendered the city. The Peloponnesians fed the Plataeans for some days, until the judges arrived from Lacedaemon, five men. When they came, no charge was brought. They called the Plataeans before them and asked them only this: whether they had done the Lacedaemonians and their allies any good in the present war. The Plataeans asked leave to speak at greater length, and put forward Astymachus son of Asopolaus and Lacon son of Aeimnestus, who was proxenus of the Lacedaemonians, to speak for them. These came forward and spoke as follows.

53 “Lacedaemonians, we surrendered our city because we trusted you. We did not expect to undergo a trial like this, but something more lawful; and we agreed to be judged by no one but you, as we now are, believing that from you above all we would get fair treatment. Now we fear that we have been wrong on both counts. We have good reason to suspect that this trial is for our lives, and that you will not prove impartial. We infer this because no accusation has been made beforehand that we might answer (we ourselves had to ask leave to speak), and because the question is a short one, to which the true answer tells against us, while a false one can be refuted. We are at a loss on every side, and we are forced, and it seems safer, to say something and take our chances. For men in our position, a speech left unmade might give us cause to say afterward that it would have saved us, had it been made. Besides everything else, persuasion is hard for us. If we were strangers to each other, we might help ourselves by bringing in evidence of things you did not know; but as it is, everything will be said to men who know it all already. What we fear is not that you have judged our merits beforehand to be inferior to yours and are making that a charge against us, but that, to oblige others, we are being brought before a court whose verdict has already been decided.

54 “Nevertheless we shall present what just claims we have, both as regards our quarrel with the Thebans and toward you and the rest of the Hellenes; we shall remind you of our good services and try to persuade you. To the short question, whether we have done the Lacedaemonians and their allies any good in this war, we answer this. If you ask us as enemies, you are not wronged if you have received no good from us; if you think of us as friends, then it is you who are more at fault, for having marched against us. In peace, and against the Mede, we have proved ourselves good men: we were not the first to break the peace now; and then we alone of the Boeotians joined in attacking the Mede for the freedom of Hellas. Inland people though we are, we fought in the sea battle at Artemisium; in the battle fought in our own land we stood beside you and Pausanias; and in whatever other danger threatened the Hellenes at that time, we took our part in all of it beyond our strength. And to you in particular, Lacedaemonians, when the greatest fear surrounded Sparta after the earthquake, when the Helots revolted and withdrew to Ithome, we sent a third of our own men to help. These are not things you should forget.

55 “Such were the men we chose to be in the great events of the past; afterward we became your enemies. But you were to blame. When the Thebans used force against us and we asked you for an alliance, you rejected us and told us to turn to the Athenians, since they were near and you lived far away. Yet in the war you have never suffered, or been in danger of suffering, anything out of the ordinary from us. If we refused to revolt from the Athenians when you told us to, we did no wrong. For they helped us against the Thebans when you hung back, and it was no longer honorable to betray them, especially since we had received benefits from them, had sought their alliance ourselves, and had been given a share in their citizenship; it was only reasonable for us to answer their summons with a will. And when either of you leads your allies, it is not the followers who are to blame if anything wrong is done, but those who lead them into what is not right.

56 “The Thebans have wronged us in many other ways, and the last of these you know yourselves, the reason why we are suffering now. They tried to seize our city in time of truce, and on a holy day besides; and we rightly punished them, in keeping with the law established among all men, that it is righteous to repel an invading enemy. It would not be reasonable for us to be harmed on their account now. If you take as justice your own immediate interest and their hostility, you will show yourselves not true judges of what is right but servants of what is expedient. And yet, if they seem useful to you now, we and the other Hellenes were far more useful to you then, when you were in greater danger. Now it is you who go out and threaten others; but in that hour, when the barbarian was bringing slavery to all, these men were on his side. It is only just to set our zeal then against our error now, if indeed we have erred at all. You will find the zeal greater than the error, and shown at a time when it was rare for any Hellene to set his courage against the power of Xerxes; when those were praised more who did not look to their own safety and to what suited them in face of the invasion, but were willing to dare the best course in the midst of danger. We were among those men and were honored above others; and now we fear that we shall be destroyed for the very same conduct, for having chosen the Athenians justly rather than you for profit. Yet you should be seen to judge the same things in the same way, and to recognize that your true advantage lies in this: that good allies should always be sure of gratitude for their courage, while your own immediate interest is served as well.

57 “Consider, too, that at present most of the Hellenes look on you as a model of honorable conduct. If you decide our case otherwise than is fitting (and this trial will not go unnoticed, for you who judge are praised, and we who are judged are not to be blamed either), take care that they do not refuse to accept an unworthy sentence passed on good men by judges who are better men still, or the dedication in the common sanctuaries of spoils taken from us, the benefactors of Hellas. It will seem a dreadful thing that the Lacedaemonians should sack Plataea; that your fathers should inscribe the city on the tripod at Delphi for its courage, and that you should wipe it out of the whole Hellenic world, every household, for the sake of the Thebans. For we have come to such a pitch of misfortune that when the Medes prevailed we were ruined, and now, before you who were once our dearest friends, we are losing to the Thebans; and we have faced the two greatest ordeals, then the threat of dying of hunger if we did not surrender our city, now a trial for our lives. We Plataeans, who were zealous for the Hellenes beyond our strength, are thrust aside by all, alone and undefended. None of our allies of those days is helping us; and you, Lacedaemonians, our only hope, we fear you will not stand firm.

58 “And yet we beg you, for the sake of the gods who were once sworn to in our alliance, and for our courage on behalf of the Hellenes, to relent and change your minds if the Thebans have persuaded you of anything. Ask of them in return the gift of not killing those whom it ill becomes you to kill. Win an honorable gratitude instead of a shameful one, and do not give pleasure to others only to earn disgrace yourselves. Destroying our bodies is the work of a moment; wiping out the infamy of it will be a labor. It is not enemies you would be justly punishing in us, but friends who were forced to make war on you. So you would be giving a righteous judgment if you guaranteed our lives, bearing in mind that we surrendered of our own will and held out our hands to you (and the custom of the Hellenes is not to kill such men), and that we have been your benefactors throughout. Look at the tombs of your fathers, who were killed by the Medes and buried in our land. Every year we have honored them at public expense with garments and the other customary offerings, bringing them the first fruits of all that our land produced in season, as friends from a friendly country and allies to those who were once our comrades in arms. You would be doing the opposite if you judged wrongly. Think of it. Pausanias buried them believing that he was laying them in friendly ground and among men such as we were. But if you kill us and make the territory of Plataea Theban, what else will you be doing but leaving your fathers and kinsmen in a hostile country, among their own murderers, robbed of the honors they now receive? More than that, you will enslave the land in which the Hellenes won their freedom; you will make desolate the temples of the gods to whom they prayed before they conquered the Medes; and you will take away the ancestral sacrifices from those who founded and established them.

59 “This would not be in keeping with your reputation, Lacedaemonians: to offend against the common customs of the Hellenes and against your ancestors, or to destroy us, your benefactors, for the sake of another’s enmity when you yourselves have suffered no wrong. Spare us; let your judgment bend to a wise compassion. Consider not only how terrible our fate would be, but who we are who would suffer it, and how unpredictable misfortune is, and on whom it may fall, however undeserving. We, as is fitting for us and as our need compels, call on the gods whom the Hellenes worship at the same altars and in common, and beg you to grant this. We appeal to the oaths your fathers swore, and ask you not to forget them. We are suppliants at your fathers’ tombs, and we call on the dead not to let us fall into the hands of the Thebans, not to let their dearest friends be handed over to their worst enemies. We remind you of that day on which we did the most glorious deeds with them, we who now on this day are in danger of suffering the most terrible fate. And now we must do what is necessary and hardest for men in our position, to bring our speech to an end, since with it the danger to our lives draws near. In closing we say this. It was not to the Thebans that we surrendered our city; we would rather have chosen the most shameful death, by starvation, than that. It was to you we came, trusting you; and if we do not persuade you, it is only just to put us back where we were and let us choose for ourselves the danger that falls to us. We implore you, Lacedaemonians, that we, Plataeans, who were the most zealous of all for the Hellenes, should not be handed over from your hands and from your good faith, suppliants as we are, to the Thebans, our bitterest enemies. Be our saviors; do not, while you liberate the rest of the Hellenes, destroy us.”

60 So the Plataeans spoke. The Thebans were afraid that the Lacedaemonians might give way somewhat in response to this speech, so they came forward and said that they too wished to speak, since the Plataeans, contrary to what the Thebans had expected, had been allowed a longer speech than an answer to the question required. When they were told to go ahead, they spoke as follows.

61 “We would not have asked to speak if these men had answered the question briefly, and had not turned on us and made an accusation, and, about themselves, made a long defense on matters outside the issue and on which no charge had been brought, and praised themselves for things no one had found fault with. As it is, we must answer the one and refute the other, so that neither our supposed baseness nor their reputation may help them, and you may hear the truth about both of us and decide. Our quarrel with them began like this. We founded Plataea later than the rest of Boeotia, along with other places that we took after driving out a mixed population. These men refused to accept our leadership, as had been arranged at first. They broke away from the rest of the Boeotians in breach of ancestral custom, and when pressure was put on them, they went over to the Athenians. With them they did us much harm, for which they suffered in return.

62 “When the barbarian came against Hellas, they say, they alone of the Boeotians did not side with the Mede; it is this above all that they glory in and that they reproach us with. We say that they did not side with the Mede only because the Athenians did not; and that later, in the same way, when the Athenians attacked the Hellenes, they alone of the Boeotians sided with the Athenians. But consider in what circumstances each of us acted. Our city at that time happened to be governed neither by an oligarchy with equal rights for its members nor by a democracy. What was most opposed to law and to moderate government, and closest to a tyranny, held power: a narrow clique of a few men. These men, hoping to strengthen their own power still further if the Mede should win, kept the people down by force and brought him in. The city as a whole was not its own master when it did this, and it is not fair to reproach it for errors it made when it was not under its laws. At any rate, after the Mede had gone and the city had recovered its laws, consider what happened when the Athenians later attacked the rest of Hellas and tried to bring our country under their power, and through faction already held most of it. Did we not fight at Coronea, defeat them, and free Boeotia? And are we not now zealously helping to free the others, providing horses and more resources than any other of the allies?

63 “That is our defense on the charge of siding with the Mede. Now we shall try to show that it is you who have wronged the Hellenes more and deserve every punishment. It was to get revenge on us, you say, that you became allies and citizens of the Athenians. In that case you should have brought them in against us alone, and not joined them in attacking others. That was open to you, even if you were being drawn along by the Athenians against your will, since the alliance with these Lacedaemonians against the Mede already existed, the alliance you make so much of. It was enough to keep us off you and, what matters most, to let you deliberate without fear. But you chose the side of the Athenians of your own will, no longer under compulsion. You say that it would have been shameful to betray your benefactors. But it was far more shameful and more unjust to betray all the Hellenes, with whom you had sworn alliance, than the Athenians alone, when the Athenians were enslaving Hellas and the others were liberating it. And the return you made them was not equal to the favor, nor free from disgrace. You brought them in, you say, because you were being wronged; and you became their accomplices in wronging others. Yet it is more shameful to fail to return a favor in kind than to leave unpaid a debt that was justly incurred but could only be repaid by injustice.

64 “You have made it clear that even then it was not for the sake of the Hellenes that you alone did not side with the Mede, but because the Athenians did not either; you wanted to do the same as they did and the opposite of what we did. And now you claim to profit from a merit you owed to others. That is not reasonable. You chose the Athenians; fight it out on their side, and do not bring up the oath sworn then as if it ought to save you now. For you abandoned it; you broke it and helped to enslave the Aeginetans and others among those who had sworn it, rather than preventing it; and you did so not unwillingly, but with the same laws you have had to this day and with no one forcing you, as we were forced. And the last invitation, made to you before you were walled in, to keep quiet and help neither side, you refused. Who could more justly be hated by all the Hellenes than you, who made a show of your courage to their harm? The good qualities you say you once showed, you have now proved were not your own; what your nature always wanted has been exposed for what it is. For you went along with the Athenians when they took the path of injustice. Such, then, is our case on our involuntary siding with the Mede and your voluntary siding with Athens.

65 “As for the last wrong you say you suffered, that we came against your city unlawfully, in time of truce and on a holy day, we do not think that even in this we were more at fault than you. If we had come to your city on our own, fought, and ravaged your land as enemies, we would be in the wrong. But if men among you, the first in wealth and birth, wanting to end your foreign alliance and bring you back to the ancestral institutions common to all the Boeotians, invited us of their own free will, what wrong are we doing? It is those who lead who break the law, rather than those who follow. But in our judgment neither they nor we did wrong. They were citizens like you, with more at stake. They opened their own gates and brought us into their own city as friends, not as enemies. They wanted to keep the worse among you from gaining any more power, and to give the better what they deserved. They meant to bring the city’s policy to its senses without banishing a single citizen, bringing it back to its kin, making it no one’s enemy, and at peace with all alike.

66 “Here is proof that we did not act as enemies. We harmed no one, and we made a proclamation that anyone who wished to live under the ancestral institutions of all the Boeotians should come over to us. You came over gladly and made an agreement with us, and at first you kept quiet. Later you noticed that we were few. Even if we did seem to have acted somewhat unfairly in entering without the consent of your people, you did not repay us in kind, by refraining from violence and persuading us with words to leave. Instead you attacked us in breach of the agreement. For those you killed in the fighting we do not grieve so much; they suffered, after all, by a kind of law. But those who held out their hands, whom you took alive and afterward promised us not to kill, and then lawlessly put to death: is this not a terrible thing you have done? You committed three crimes in a short time: the agreement you broke, the killing of the men that followed, and the promise you made us, and broke, not to kill them if we did no harm to your property in the fields. And yet you say that it is we who broke the law, and you claim that you yourselves should not pay the penalty. Not so, if these judges decide rightly. You will be punished for all of it.

67 “We have gone through all this at length, Lacedaemonians, for your sake and for ours: so that you may know that you will be justly condemning them, and that we have taken a revenge that is still more righteous. Do not be softened by hearing of their old acts of courage, if there were any. Such deeds should help those who are wronged; but for those who do something shameful they should mean a double penalty, because their crime is out of keeping with their past. Do not let them profit by lamentation and pity, calling on your fathers’ tombs and their own desolation. For we on our side can show you that our young men, whom these people killed, suffered a far more terrible fate. Of their fathers, some died at Coronea bringing Boeotia over to your side; others are left in their old age, with empty houses, and they make a much juster supplication to you to punish these men. Pity is more fitly given to men who suffer what they do not deserve; those who suffer justly, as these men do, should rather be a cause for rejoicing. And the desolation they now face is of their own making; for they willingly rejected the better allies. They broke the law without any previous wrong from us, deciding out of hatred rather than justice; and the punishment they will now pay is not equal to their crime. For they will suffer by due process of law, not, as they claim, holding out their hands on the battlefield, but having surrendered themselves to trial by agreement. Lacedaemonians, defend the law of the Hellenes, which these men have broken; and to us, who have suffered lawless treatment, give a just return for the zeal we have shown. Do not let their speeches push us aside in your esteem. Show the Hellenes by example that you will set before them contests not of words but of deeds. When the deeds are good, a brief report is enough; when they are wrong, speeches dressed in fine phrases become a veil for them. But if leaders like you now sum up the question and decide it for all alike, men will be less inclined to look for fine words to cover unjust acts.”

68 That is what the Thebans said. The Lacedaemonian judges thought that their question, whether the Plataeans had received any good from them in the war, would be the right one to put. Their reasoning was this. All along they had asked the Plataeans, supposedly, to remain neutral in keeping with the old treaty made by Pausanias after the Persian War; and later, before the siege wall was built, they had offered them terms, to be neutral according to that treaty; and the Plataeans had not accepted. So, considering that by their own just proposal they were now released from the treaty, and that they had suffered harm at the Plataeans’ hands, they brought them forward again one by one and asked each the same question, whether he had done the Lacedaemonians and their allies any good in the war. When a man said he had not, they took him away and killed him; they made no exceptions. They put to death no fewer than two hundred of the Plataeans themselves, and twenty-five Athenians who had been besieged with them; the women they enslaved. The city they gave for about a year to some Megarians who had been driven out in a civil conflict, and to those Plataeans of their own party who survived, to live in. Afterward they razed it entirely to the ground, from the foundations, and built near the temple of Hera an inn two hundred feet square, with rooms all round, below and above, using the roofs and doors of the Plataeans; and from the other materials found inside the walls, bronze and iron, they made couches and dedicated them to Hera, and they built her a stone temple a hundred feet long. The land they confiscated and leased out for ten years, and Thebans farmed it. Almost the whole of the Lacedaemonians’ hostility toward the Plataeans was for the sake of the Thebans, whom they thought useful to them in the war that was then just beginning. That was the end of Plataea, in the ninety-third year after it became the ally of Athens.⁶

69 The forty Peloponnesian ships that had gone to help the Lesbians, after fleeing across the open sea as described, chased by the Athenians and caught in a storm off Crete, had been carried from there in scattered groups to the Peloponnese. At Cyllene they found thirteen triremes of the Leucadians and Ambraciots, and Brasidas son of Tellis, who had come to act as adviser to Alcidas. Having failed at Lesbos, the Lacedaemonians wanted to strengthen their fleet and sail to Corcyra, which was in the grip of civil strife. There were only twelve Athenian ships at Naupactus, and they meant to arrive before any larger fleet could come to help from Athens. So Brasidas and Alcidas were preparing for this.

70 The civil strife at Corcyra had begun when the prisoners taken in the sea battles off Epidamnus returned, released by the Corinthians.⁷ In name they had been released on a security of eight hundred talents pledged by their proxeni; in fact they had been persuaded to win Corcyra over for Corinth. These men set to work, approaching each of the citizens in turn, to bring the city to revolt from Athens. An Attic ship and a Corinthian ship arrived, bringing envoys, and after the discussions the Corcyraeans voted to remain allies of the Athenians under the existing terms, and friends of the Peloponnesians as before. There was a man named Peithias, who was a volunteer proxenus of the Athenians and the leader of the people. These men brought him to trial, alleging that he was enslaving Corcyra to Athens. He was acquitted, and in turn he prosecuted the five richest of them, alleging that they were cutting vine stakes in the precinct of Zeus and of Alcinous; the fine was a stater for each stake. They were convicted, and because the fine was so large they sat as suppliants at the temples, asking to pay it in installments. But Peithias, who happened also to be a member of the council, persuaded it to apply the law. Shut out by the law, and learning at the same time that Peithias meant, while he was still on the council, to persuade the people to have the same friends and enemies as the Athenians, they banded together, took daggers, burst suddenly into the council, and killed Peithias and about sixty others, councilors and private citizens. A few who shared Peithias’ views took refuge in the Attic trireme, which was still there.

71 When they had done this, they called the Corcyraeans together and told them that it was all for the best and that now they would be least likely to be enslaved by the Athenians. In future, they said, they should receive neither side except with a single ship at a time and peaceably, and should treat any larger force as hostile. Having said this, they forced the assembly to ratify the proposal. They also sent envoys to Athens at once to explain that what had been done was expedient, and to persuade the men who had fled there to take no hostile action, so that there would be no reprisal.

72 When the envoys arrived, the Athenians arrested them as revolutionaries, along with all those they had won over, and put them away on Aegina. Meanwhile at Corcyra, when a Corinthian trireme arrived with Lacedaemonian envoys, those in control of affairs attacked the people and defeated them in battle. When night came on, the people took refuge on the acropolis and the high parts of the city, gathered there, and established themselves, and they held the Hyllaic harbor. The other side seized the marketplace, where most of them lived, and the harbor beside it that faces the mainland.

73 The next day there was a little skirmishing, and both sides sent round into the countryside, calling on the slaves and offering them freedom. Most of the household slaves joined the people as allies, while the other side got eight hundred auxiliaries from the mainland.

74 After a day’s interval there was another battle, and the people won, having the advantage in the strength of their positions and in numbers. Their women joined boldly in the fighting, throwing tiles from the houses and standing up to the tumult with a courage beyond their nature. The rout came late in the afternoon, and the few, afraid that the people would come on and take the dockyard at the first rush and destroy them, set fire to the houses around the marketplace and the tenement blocks, to cut off the approach. They spared neither their own nor anyone else’s, so that much merchandise was burned and the whole city was in danger of being destroyed, if a wind had sprung up to carry the flames toward it. So they broke off the battle, and both sides kept quiet and stood guard for the night. The Corinthian ship slipped away, now that the people had won, and most of the auxiliaries got across to the mainland unobserved.

75 The next day Nicostratus son of Diitrephes, an Athenian general, came to help from Naupactus with twelve ships and five hundred Messenian hoplites. He tried to arrange a settlement, and persuaded them to agree with one another that ten men, those most responsible, should be tried (they did not wait for this), and that the rest should go on living in the city, having made peace with one another and an alliance with the Athenians, so as to have the same enemies and friends. Having done this, he was about to sail away; but the leaders of the people persuaded him to leave them five of his ships, so that their opponents would be less inclined to make any move, and they would man the same number from their own people and send them with him. He agreed, and they began enrolling their personal enemies for the ships. These men, afraid that they would be sent off to Athens, took refuge as suppliants in the temple of the Dioscuri. Nicostratus tried to raise them up and reassure them. When he could not persuade them, the people armed themselves on this pretext, claiming that their refusal to sail showed that they meant no good; they took the weapons from their houses, and would have killed some of those they came upon if Nicostratus had not stopped them. When the others saw what was happening, they took refuge as suppliants in the temple of Hera, no fewer than four hundred of them. The people, fearing that they might start a revolt, persuaded them to get up, and took them across to the island in front of the temple of Hera, where provisions were sent over to them.

76 At this stage of the civil strife, on the fourth or fifth day after the men had been taken to the island, the Peloponnesian ships from Cyllene, which had been lying there since the voyage from Ionia, arrived, fifty-three of them. Alcidas commanded them as before, and Brasidas sailed with him as adviser. They anchored at Sybota, a harbor on the mainland, and at dawn sailed against Corcyra.

77 The Corcyraeans were in great confusion and alarm, both at the state of the city and at the attack. They began fitting out sixty ships, and sent them out against the enemy as each was manned, although the Athenians urged them to let them sail out first, and to follow afterward with all their ships together. When their ships came up to the enemy scattered like this, two deserted at once, and in others the men on board were fighting one another; there was no order in anything they did. When the Peloponnesians saw the confusion, they deployed twenty ships against the Corcyraeans and the rest against the twelve Athenian ships, two of which were the Salaminia and the Paralus.

78 The Corcyraeans, attacking badly and a few ships at a time, got into difficulties in their part of the battle. The Athenians, fearing the enemy’s numbers and being surrounded, did not attack the ships deployed against them in a body or in the center, but fell on a wing and sank one ship. After this, when the enemy had formed a circle, they sailed around it and tried to throw it into confusion. Those facing the Corcyraeans saw this, and afraid that what had happened at Naupactus might happen again, came to help; and the ships, now all together, advanced against the Athenians at once. The Athenians began to retreat, backing water, and at the same time they wanted the Corcyraean ships to escape first, as far as possible, while they themselves withdrew slowly with the enemy ranged against them. Such was the sea battle, and it ended at sunset.

79 The Corcyraeans were afraid that the enemy, as victors, would sail against the city and either take off the men from the island or make some other revolutionary move. So they brought the men from the island back to the temple of Hera and guarded the city. But the Peloponnesians, though they had won the sea battle, did not dare to sail against the city; they sailed back with thirteen Corcyraean ships they had taken to the mainland, the place they had put out from. The next day they still did not sail against the city, although the Corcyraeans were in great confusion and fear and Brasidas, it is said, urged Alcidas to do so; but Brasidas did not have an equal vote. Instead they landed at the promontory of Leucimme and ravaged the countryside.

80 Meanwhile the people of Corcyra, terrified that the ships would sail against them, entered into talks with the suppliants and the others about how the city might be saved, and persuaded some of them to go on board the ships; for in spite of everything they had manned thirty, expecting the attack. The Peloponnesians, after ravaging the land until midday, sailed away; and toward nightfall fire signals told them that sixty Athenian ships were approaching from Leucas. The Athenians had sent these, under the general Eurymedon son of Thucles, when they learned of the civil strife and that the ships with Alcidas were about to sail against Corcyra.

81 So the Peloponnesians at once set off home that night in haste, keeping close to the shore; they hauled their ships across the isthmus of Leucas, so as not to be seen sailing round, and got away. When the Corcyraeans saw that the Attic ships were approaching and the enemy’s ships had gone, they took the Messenians, who had been outside the walls, and brought them into the city. They ordered the ships they had manned to sail round into the Hyllaic harbor, and while these were on their way round, they killed any of their enemies they could lay hands on. Those whom they had persuaded to go on board the ships they took off and put to death. They went to the temple of Hera, persuaded about fifty of the suppliants to stand trial, and condemned them all to death. When they saw what was happening, most of the suppliants, those who had not been persuaded, killed one another there in the sanctuary; some hanged themselves from the trees, and others made away with themselves as each could. For the seven days that Eurymedon stayed after his arrival with the sixty ships, the Corcyraeans went on butchering those of their fellow citizens whom they considered their enemies. The charge they brought was conspiring to overthrow the democracy, but some were killed because of private hatred, and others by their debtors because of money owed to them. Death took every form; and, as usually happens at such times, there was nothing that did not happen, and worse besides. A father killed his son; men were dragged from the altars and killed beside them; and some were even walled up in the temple of Dionysus and died there.

82 To such savagery did the civil strife proceed; and it seemed all the more savage because it was among the first. Later, of course, virtually the whole Hellenic world was convulsed, since in every city there were quarrels between the leaders of the people, who wanted to bring in the Athenians, and the few, who wanted to bring in the Lacedaemonians. In peacetime they would have had no pretext for calling them in, and no inclination to; but in war, when each side had an alliance ready to hand, both for harming its opponents and, by the same means, for strengthening itself, those who wanted to make a revolution easily found occasions to bring in outside help. Many terrible things befell the cities through civil strife, things that happen and always will happen as long as human nature remains the same, though they may be more violent or milder and differ in their forms, according to the changes of circumstance in each case. In peace and prosperity both cities and individuals have better minds, because they are not plunged into necessities they did not choose. But war, which takes away the easy supply of daily life, is a violent teacher, and it brings most people’s passions down to the level of their circumstances. So the cities fell into civil strife, and those that came to it later, hearing what had been done elsewhere, went much further still in devising new ideas, both in the ingenuity of their enterprises and in the monstrousness of their reprisals. They changed the accepted meaning of words in relation to deeds as they saw fit. Reckless daring was now regarded as the courage of a loyal partisan; prudent hesitation, as cowardice dressed up; moderation, as a cover for unmanliness; and the ability to understand a question from every side, as an inability to act on any of them. Frantic impulsiveness was counted the mark of a real man, and to plot with an eye to one’s own safety was a plausible excuse for backing out. The man who raged was always trusted; the man who spoke against him was suspect. A man who plotted and succeeded was clever, and one who saw a plot coming was cleverer still; but a man who planned ahead so as to need neither was a wrecker of his party and afraid of the other side. In short, a man was praised if he struck first at someone about to do harm, and also if he egged on to wrongdoing someone who had never thought of it. Even blood became a weaker tie than party, because a partisan was more ready to dare without asking why. For such associations were formed not for mutual help under the established laws but in defiance of them, for greed. Their members confirmed their pledges to one another not by divine law so much as by having broken the law together. Fair proposals from their opponents they accepted, if those opponents had the upper hand, with precautions in deed, not in a spirit of generosity. To take revenge on someone was valued more than never to have been injured in the first place. If ever oaths of reconciliation were sworn, they were given by each side for the moment, to meet a difficulty, and held only so long as neither had strength from any other source. But when the chance came, whoever first took courage, if he saw his opponent off guard, took his revenge with more pleasure because of the pledge than he would have openly. He reckoned that it was safe, and that by winning through treachery he had also won a prize for intelligence. Most people would rather be called clever when they are villains than good when they are simple; they are ashamed of the one and glory in the other. The cause of all this was power pursued out of greed and ambition, and from these came the fervor of men once they were caught up in rivalry. For the leaders in the cities, on each side, used fine-sounding names: one side professed political equality for the masses, the other a moderate aristocracy. They served the public interest in words while making it their prize; and striving in every way to get the better of one another, they dared the most terrible deeds and pursued revenges more terrible still. They set them not within the limits of justice and the good of the city but by whatever, on either side, gave them pleasure at the moment, and they were ready, whether by an unjust verdict of condemnation or by seizing power with their own hands, to glut the rivalry of the hour. So neither side had any regard for piety; but those who managed to accomplish some odious deed under cover of a fine phrase were the more highly spoken of. The citizens who stood in between were destroyed by both sides, either because they would not join in the struggle or out of envy that they should survive.

83 Thus every form of wickedness arose in the Hellenic world through civil strife. Simplicity, which is so large a part of a noble nature, was laughed out of existence. Mutual opposition of mind, with no trust on either side, prevailed far and wide. For there was nothing to reconcile them, no word that could be relied on, no oath that inspired fear. All of them, when they had the upper hand, reckoning that security was not to be hoped for, looked to avoiding injury rather than being able to trust. And it was generally the men of meaner intelligence who survived. Afraid of their own shortcomings and of their opponents’ intelligence, afraid of being beaten in argument and of being outmaneuvered first by their opponents’ versatile minds, they went boldly to action. Their opponents, contemptuous and supposing that they would see it coming, and that there was no need to take by action what they could get by intelligence, were caught off guard and destroyed in greater numbers.

84 [It was in Corcyra, then, that most of these things were first dared:⁸ all that men who are ruled with insolence rather than moderation will do in retaliation when they get the chance, against those who have given them cause for vengeance; all that men longing to be rid of their habitual poverty, and above all passionately coveting their neighbors’ goods, will plan against justice; and all that men who attack not for gain but as equals, carried away by the wildness of their anger, will carry out with savage and pitiless cruelty. With the life of the city thrown into confusion at this crisis, human nature, which is accustomed to do wrong even in spite of the laws, now mastered the laws and gladly showed itself ungoverned in passion, stronger than justice, and the enemy of all superiority. For men would not have put revenge above piety, and gain above not doing wrong, if envy had not had a power to do harm. And men claim the right, in taking revenge on others, to do away beforehand with the common laws on such matters, on which all can rest their hope of being saved themselves if they come to grief; they do not leave them standing for the day when they may be in danger and need them.]

85 So the Corcyraeans in the city vented these first passions on one another, and Eurymedon and the Athenians sailed away with their ships. Later the Corcyraean exiles (about five hundred of them had escaped) seized forts on the mainland, made themselves masters of the territory across the strait that belonged to Corcyra, and using it as a base plundered the people on the island and did much damage, and there was a severe famine in the city. They also sent embassies to Lacedaemon and Corinth about their return; and when nothing came of this, they afterward got together boats and mercenaries and crossed over to the island, about six hundred in all. They burned their boats, so that they would have no hope except to make themselves masters of the land, went up Mount Istone, built a fort there, and began destroying the people in the city and became masters of the countryside.

86 At the end of the same summer the Athenians sent twenty ships to Sicily under Laches son of Melanopus and Charoeades son of Euphiletus as generals.⁹ The Syracusans and the Leontines had gone to war with each other. On the side of the Syracusans were all the Dorian cities except Camarina, the same cities that at the very beginning of the war had been enrolled in the Lacedaemonian alliance, though they had taken no active part in the fighting. On the side of the Leontines were the Chalcidian cities and Camarina. In Italy the Locrians were with the Syracusans, and the Rhegians, as kinsmen, with the Leontines. The allies of the Leontines sent to Athens, appealing to an old alliance and to the fact that they were Ionians, and persuaded the Athenians to send them ships; for they were being shut off by the Syracusans from both land and sea. The Athenians sent them, on the pretext of kinship, but in fact because they wanted to stop grain from being shipped from there to the Peloponnese, and to make a preliminary trial whether affairs in Sicily could be brought under their control. So they established themselves at Rhegium in Italy and carried on the war together with their allies. And the summer ended.

87 The following winter the plague attacked the Athenians a second time. It had never entirely left them, though there had been something of a respite. This second outbreak lasted no less than a year, the first one two years; so that nothing did more than this to crush the Athenians and to cripple their power. No fewer than 4,400 hoplites from the regular ranks died of it, and three hundred cavalry, and of the rest of the population a number that was never discovered. At this time too there were the many earthquakes, at Athens, in Euboea, and in Boeotia, especially at Orchomenus in Boeotia.

88 The same winter the Athenians in Sicily and the Rhegians made an expedition with thirty ships against the so-called islands of Aeolus; in summer it was impossible to campaign there for lack of water. The islands are held by the Liparaeans, who are colonists from Cnidus. They live on one of the islands, which is not large and is called Lipara, and from there they go out and farm the others, Didyme, Strongyle, and Hiera. The people there believe that Hephaestus has his forge on Hiera, because at night it can be seen sending up a great deal of fire, and smoke by day. These islands lie off the territory of the Sicels and the Messanians, and they were allies of Syracuse. The Athenians laid waste their land, and when they would not come over, sailed back to Rhegium. So the winter ended, and with it the fifth year of this war, which Thucydides recorded.

89 The following summer the Peloponnesians and their allies came as far as the Isthmus, intending to invade Attica, under the leadership of Agis son of Archidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians; but there were many earthquakes, and they turned back, and no invasion took place. At about this time, while the earthquakes were going on, the sea at Orobiae in Euboea drew back from what was then the shoreline, then rose in a great wave and came over part of the town. Some of it flooded and some of it subsided, so that what was once land is now sea; and it killed all the people who could not run up to higher ground in time. Near Atalanta, the island off Opuntian Locris, there was a similar flood, which carried away part of the Athenian fort there and wrecked one of two ships that had been hauled up on the beach. At Peparethus too the sea drew back somewhat, though there was no flood; and an earthquake threw down part of the wall, the town hall, and a few other houses. The cause of such a thing, in my opinion, is this: at the point where the earthquake was strongest, the sea is driven back, and then suddenly drawn in again with greater violence and makes the flood. Without an earthquake, I do not think such a thing could happen.

90 The same summer there was fighting in Sicily, by various parties as circumstances led each of them, the Sicilian Greeks campaigning against one another and the Athenians together with their allies. I shall mention the things most worth recording that were done by the allies together with the Athenians, or against the Athenians by their enemies. Charoeades, the Athenian general, had by now been killed by the Syracusans in battle, and Laches, who had sole command of the fleet, made an expedition with the allies against Mylae, which belonged to Messana. Two tribal regiments of the Messanians happened to be on garrison duty at Mylae, and they had laid an ambush for the men from the ships. The Athenians and their allies routed the men from the ambush and killed many of them, then attacked the fortification and forced the garrison to surrender the citadel by agreement and to march with them against Messana. After this, when the Athenians and their allies came against Messana, its people too came over, giving hostages and the other guarantees.

91 The same summer the Athenians sent thirty ships around the Peloponnese under the command of Demosthenes son of Alcisthenes and Procles son of Theodorus, and sixty ships and two thousand hoplites to Melos under the command of Nicias son of Niceratus. They wanted to bring the Melians over, for although they were islanders, they were unwilling to be subjects or even to join the Athenian alliance. When the Melians did not come over, even though their land was laid waste, the Athenians left Melos and sailed to Oropus, in the Graean district. They put in at nightfall, and the hoplites at once disembarked and marched overland to Tanagra in Boeotia. The Athenians from the city in full force, under the command of Hipponicus son of Callias and Eurymedon son of Thucles, met them there by land at a signal. They camped that day at Tanagra, ravaged the land, and spent the night there. The next day they defeated in battle the Tanagraeans who came out against them, along with some Thebans who had come to help; they took up the arms of the dead, set up a trophy, and withdrew, the one force to the city and the other to the ships. Nicias sailed along the coast of Locris with his sixty ships, laid waste the places by the sea, and returned home.

92 At about this time the Lacedaemonians founded their colony of Heraclea in Trachis, with the following purpose. The Malians as a whole are made up of three parts, the Paralians, the Hierians, and the Trachinians. The Trachinians had been ruined in war by their neighbors the Oetaeans. At first they meant to attach themselves to the Athenians, but fearing that they could not be trusted, they sent to Lacedaemon, choosing Tisamenus as their envoy. The Dorians, the mother country of the Lacedaemonians, joined in the embassy and made the same request, for they too were suffering at the hands of the Oetaeans. When the Lacedaemonians heard them, they decided to send out the colony. They wanted to help both the Trachinians and the Dorians; and the city also seemed to them well placed for the war against the Athenians. A fleet could be fitted out there against Euboea, so that the crossing would be short, and it would be useful for the route to Thrace. All in all, they were eager to found the place. First they consulted the god at Delphi, and when he told them to go ahead, they sent out the settlers, both from among themselves and from the Perioeci, and invited any of the other Hellenes who wished to join them, except Ionians, Achaeans, and certain other peoples. Three Lacedaemonians led it as founders, Leon, Alcidas, and Damagon. Once established, they walled the city anew; it is now called Heraclea and lies about forty stades from Thermopylae and twenty from the sea. They also began building dockyards, and they closed off the approach by Thermopylae at the narrows themselves, so that it would be easy to guard.

93 While this city was being settled, the Athenians at first were alarmed, thinking that it was being founded chiefly as a threat to Euboea, since the crossing from there to Cenaeum in Euboea is short. Later, however, things turned out contrary to their expectation, for no harm came from it. The reasons were these. The Thessalians, who were the power in that region and on whose land it was being founded, were afraid that it might become a powerful neighbor, and they kept harassing and making war on the new settlers without letup until they had worn them down, though at first there had been a great many of them; for everyone went there with confidence, since it was the Lacedaemonians who were founding it, and he thought the city secure. Not least, however, it was the Lacedaemonian governors who came out there who ruined things and reduced the population, frightening most of the settlers away by their harsh and sometimes unjust administration; so that their neighbors could now more easily get the better of them.

94 The same summer, at about the time when the Athenians were held up at Melos, the Athenians in the thirty ships around the Peloponnese first ambushed and killed some guards at Ellomenus in Leucadian territory, and later came against Leucas with a larger force: all the Acarnanians, who followed in full force except for Oeniadae, the Zacynthians and Cephallenians, and fifteen Corcyraean ships. The Leucadians kept quiet, overwhelmed by numbers, while their land was ravaged both outside the isthmus and within it, where Leucas itself and the temple of Apollo are. The Acarnanians asked Demosthenes, the Athenian general, to wall them off, thinking they could easily reduce them by siege and be rid of a city that had always been hostile to them. But at this time Demosthenes was persuaded by the Messenians that it would be a fine thing, with so large an army assembled, to attack the Aetolians. They were enemies of Naupactus, and if he defeated them he would easily win over to the Athenians the rest of the mainland in that region as well. The Aetolian nation, they explained, was large and warlike, but it lived in unwalled villages that were far apart and used light equipment, so it would not be hard to subdue them before they could combine. They urged him to attack first the Apodotians, then the Ophionians, and after them the Eurytanians, who are the largest part of the Aetolians and are said to speak a most unintelligible language and to eat their meat raw. Once these were taken, the rest would come over easily.

95 Demosthenes was persuaded, partly to oblige the Messenians, but chiefly because he thought that without forces from Athens, with his mainland allies and the Aetolians, he could go by land against Boeotia. He would go through the territory of the Ozolian Locrians to Cytinium in Doris, keeping Parnassus on his right, until he came down among the Phocians. They, he thought, would gladly join the campaign because of their long-standing friendship with Athens, or could be forced to; and Phocis is already on the border of Boeotia. So he set out with his whole army from Leucas, against the wishes of the Acarnanians, and sailed along the coast to Sollium. He told the Acarnanians of his plan, but they would not accept it because he had refused to wall off Leucas; so he made the expedition against the Aetolians himself with the rest of his army, the Cephallenians, Messenians, and Zacynthians, and three hundred Athenian marines from his own ships, the fifteen Corcyraean ships having gone home. He set out from Oeneon in Locris. These Ozolian Locrians were allies, and they were to meet the Athenians in full force in the interior. Since they were neighbors of the Aetolians and armed in the same way, it was thought that they would be of great use on the campaign, with their knowledge of how the Aetolians fought and of the country.

96 He camped with his army in the sanctuary of Nemean Zeus, where the poet Hesiod is said to have been killed by the people of the district, after an oracle had told him that he would suffer this at Nemea. At dawn he set out and marched into Aetolia. On the first day he took Potidania, on the second Crocyleium, and on the third Teichium. There he stayed, and sent the plunder off to Eupalium in Locris. His plan was to subdue the rest in this way and afterward, if the Ophionians would not come to terms, to go back to Naupactus and make a separate expedition against them. But these preparations had not escaped the Aetolians, either when they were first being planned or later; and as soon as the army had invaded, they all came to the rescue in great force, so that even the most remote of the Ophionians, the Bomiaeans and Callians, whose territory reaches down toward the Malian Gulf, came to help.

97 The Messenians gave Demosthenes the same sort of advice as before. Assuring him, as they had at the start, that the Aetolians would be easy to conquer, they urged him to go against the villages as quickly as possible and not wait until they had all gathered and could form up against him, but to try to take whatever village lay in his path. He was persuaded by them, and trusting to his luck, since nothing had gone against him, he did not wait for the Locrians, who were to come and support him (he was very short of light-armed javelin men), but advanced against Aegitium and took it by storm at the first assault. The inhabitants had slipped away and were sitting on the hills above the town; for it stood on high ground about eighty stades from the sea. The Aetolians, who had by now come to the relief of Aegitium, attacked the Athenians and their allies, running down from the hills from every direction and hurling javelins. When the Athenian army advanced, they fell back, and when it retreated, they pressed on it. The fighting went on like this for a long time, pursuits and retreats, and in both the Athenians had the worse of it.

98 As long as the archers had arrows and were able to use them, the Athenians held out, for the Aetolians, being lightly armed, were kept back by the archery. But when the captain of the archers was killed, his men scattered; the soldiers themselves were worn out from long exposure to the same toil, and the Aetolians kept pressing on them and hurling javelins. Then at last they turned and fled. Falling into ravines from which there was no way out and into country they did not know, they were destroyed; for their guide, Chromon the Messenian, happened to have been killed. The Aetolians, who were quick on their feet and lightly armed, kept throwing javelins and caught and killed many of them there in the rout. Most of them lost their way and got into a wood with no paths through it, and the Aetolians brought fire and burned the wood around them. Every form of flight and death befell the Athenian army, and the survivors barely escaped to the sea and to Oeneon in Locris, where they had started from. Many of the allies were killed, and of the Athenians themselves about 120 hoplites. So many men, all of the same age, the best men indeed whom the city of Athens lost in this war, perished here; and the other general, Procles, was also killed. They recovered their dead from the Aetolians under a truce, withdrew to Naupactus, and later were carried back by ship to Athens. Demosthenes stayed behind in the neighborhood of Naupactus, afraid of the Athenians after what had happened.

99 At about the same time the Athenians in Sicily sailed to Locris, defeated in a landing the Locrians who came out against them, and took a frontier post on the river Halex.

100 The same summer the Aetolians, who had earlier sent envoys to Corinth and Lacedaemon, Tolophus the Ophionian, Boriades the Eurytanian, and Tisander the Apodotian, persuaded them to send an army against Naupactus because it had brought in the Athenians. Toward autumn the Lacedaemonians sent out three thousand hoplites of the allies. Five hundred of these came from Heraclea in Trachis, the newly founded city. A Spartiate, Eurylochus, commanded the force, and with him went the Spartiates Macarius and Menedaius.

101 When the army had assembled at Delphi, Eurylochus sent a herald to the Ozolian Locrians; for the road to Naupactus ran through their country, and he also wanted to detach them from the Athenians. Of the Locrians, the people of Amphissa helped him most, since they were afraid because of their enmity with the Phocians. They gave hostages first themselves, and persuaded the others to do so, since they feared the approaching army: first their neighbors the Myoneans, who held the most difficult approach into Locris, then the Ipneans, Messapians, Tritaeans, Chalaeans, Tolophonians, Hessians, and Oeantheans. All these also joined the expedition. The Olpaeans gave hostages but did not follow; the Hyaeans would not give hostages until the Peloponnesians took one of their villages, called Polis.

102 When everything was ready and he had deposited the hostages at Cytinium in Doris, Eurylochus advanced with his army through Locris against Naupactus. On his march he took Oeneon and Eupalium, two of their towns, since they would not come over. Arriving in the territory of Naupactus, where the Aetolians had by now joined them, they ravaged the land and took the suburb, which was unwalled. Then they went against Molycreium, a Corinthian colony subject to Athens, and took it. But Demosthenes the Athenian, who happened still to be in the neighborhood of Naupactus after the Aetolian affair, learned of the army in advance and feared for the city. He went and persuaded the Acarnanians, though with difficulty because of his withdrawal from Leucas, to help Naupactus. They sent with him, on board ships, a thousand hoplites, who got in and saved the place; for there was a danger that, the wall being large and the defenders few, they could not hold out. When Eurylochus and his men saw that the force had got in and that it was impossible to take the city by storm, they withdrew, not to the Peloponnese, but to Aeolis, as Calydon and Pleuron and the places around them are now called, and to Proschium in Aetolia. For the Ambraciots came to them and persuaded them to join in attacking Amphilochian Argos and the rest of Amphilochia, and Acarnania too, telling them that if they conquered these places, the whole mainland would come into alliance with the Lacedaemonians. Eurylochus was persuaded, dismissed the Aetolians, and waited quietly with his army in that region until the time came to help the Ambraciots when they took the field against Argos. And the summer ended.

103 The following winter the Athenians in Sicily, with their Hellenic allies and those of the Sicels who had been ruled by force by the Syracusans or had been their allies and had revolted and were fighting on the Athenian side, attacked the Sicel town of Inessa, whose citadel was held by the Syracusans. When they could not take it, they went away. During the withdrawal the Syracusans from the fort attacked the allies of the Athenians, who were retreating behind them; they fell on them, routed part of the army, and killed a good many. After this Laches and the Athenians made several landings from their ships in Locris; on the river Caecinus they defeated in battle about three hundred Locrians who came out against them with Proxenus son of Capaton, took up their arms, and went away.

104 The same winter the Athenians also purified Delos, in obedience, it seems, to some oracle.¹⁰ Peisistratus the tyrant had purified it before, though not all of it, only as much of the island as could be seen from the sanctuary. This time the whole island was purified, in the following way. They took up all the graves of the dead that were on Delos, and proclaimed that in future no one should die or give birth on the island, but should be carried across to Rheneia. Rheneia is so close to Delos that Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, who for some time was powerful at sea and ruled the other islands, captured Rheneia and dedicated it to Delian Apollo by binding it to Delos with a chain. After the purification the Athenians held the four-yearly festival, the Delia, for the first time. In ancient times too there had been a great gathering at Delos of the Ionians and the neighboring islanders. They came to the festival with their wives and children, as the Ionians now do to the Ephesia, and there were contests there, athletic and musical, and the cities brought choruses. Homer shows most clearly that this was so in the following verses, from his hymn to Apollo: “But when, Phoebus, your heart takes most delight in Delos, / where the Ionians in their trailing robes gather / with their children and their wives along your way, / there they remember you and delight you with boxing, / with dancing and with song, whenever they hold the contest.” That there was also a musical contest, and that men went there to compete, he shows again in these lines from the same hymn. After celebrating the Delian chorus of women, he ended his praise with the following verses, in which he also made mention of himself: “But come now, may Apollo be gracious, and Artemis with him; / and farewell to you all. Remember me hereafter, / whenever some other man of those who live on earth, / some stranger who has suffered much, comes here and asks: / ‘Girls, which of the singers who come here is sweetest to you, / and in whom do you most delight?’ Then all of you answer / with one voice, and kindly: ‘A blind man; he lives in rocky Chios.’” That much evidence Homer has given that there was a great gathering and festival at Delos even in ancient times. Later the islanders and the Athenians went on sending choruses with offerings, but the contests and most of the rest were abandoned, probably because of misfortunes, until on this occasion the Athenians restored the contest and added horse races, which had not been held before.

105 The same winter the Ambraciots, as they had promised Eurylochus when they kept his army there, marched against Amphilochian Argos with three thousand hoplites. They invaded the territory of Argos and seized Olpae, a strong fort on a hill by the sea, which the Acarnanians had once fortified and used as a common court of justice; it is about twenty-five stades from the city of Argos, which lies on the coast. Some of the Acarnanians came to the relief of Argos, while others encamped at a place in Amphilochia called Crenae, to watch for the Peloponnesians under Eurylochus and keep them from getting through to the Ambraciots unnoticed. They also sent for Demosthenes, the Athenian who had commanded in Aetolia, to be their leader, and for the twenty Athenian ships that happened to be off the Peloponnese under the command of Aristoteles son of Timocrates and Hierophon son of Antimnestus. The Ambraciots at Olpae, for their part, sent a messenger to their city, urging them to come to their help in full force. They were afraid that Eurylochus and his men might not be able to get past the Acarnanians, and that they would then have to fight alone, or would not be able to retreat safely if they wanted to.

106 When Eurylochus and his Peloponnesians learned that the Ambraciots had arrived at Olpae, they set out from Proschium and went to help them in haste. They crossed the Achelous and marched through Acarnania, which was empty of men because they had gone to the relief of Argos, keeping the city of Stratus and its garrison on their right and the rest of Acarnania on their left. Having crossed the territory of Stratus, they went on through Phytia, then past the edge of Medeon, then through Limnaea, and so came into the country of the Agraeans, which is no longer Acarnanian and was friendly to them. They reached Mount Thyamus, which belongs to the Agraeans, crossed it, and came down into the territory of Argos when it was already night. Passing between the city of Argos and the Acarnanian outpost at Crenae, they got through unseen and joined the Ambraciots at Olpae.

107 United now, at daybreak they took up a position at the place called Metropolis and made camp there. Not long afterward the Athenians arrived in the Ambracian Gulf with their twenty ships to help the Argives, and Demosthenes with two hundred Messenian hoplites and sixty Athenian archers. The ships lay off the hill of Olpae on the seaward side. The Acarnanians and a few of the Amphilochians (the greater number were held down by force by the Ambraciots) had by now gathered at Argos and were preparing to fight the enemy, and they chose Demosthenes as leader of the whole allied force, together with their own generals. He led them up near Olpae and made camp; a large ravine separated the two armies. For five days they kept quiet; on the sixth both sides drew up for battle. The Peloponnesian army was the larger and overlapped his own, so Demosthenes, fearing that he would be surrounded, placed an ambush of about four hundred hoplites and light-armed troops together in a sunken road overgrown with brush, so that at the very moment of contact they could rise up and take the overlapping part of the enemy line in the rear. When both sides were ready, they closed. Demosthenes held the right wing with the Messenians and a few Athenians; the rest of the line was held by the Acarnanians, drawn up by cities, and the Amphilochian javelin men who were present. The Peloponnesians and Ambraciots were drawn up mixed together, except for the Mantineans. These were massed rather toward the left, though not on the very end of the wing; Eurylochus and his men held the extreme left, opposite the Messenians and Demosthenes.

108 When they were already at close quarters and the Peloponnesians with their wing were overlapping and beginning to encircle the enemy’s right, the Acarnanians from the ambush came up behind them, fell on them, and routed them, so that they did not stand to fight; and in their panic they set the greater part of the army fleeing too. For when the others saw Eurylochus’ division, the strongest part of the army, being destroyed, they were all the more afraid. The Messenians, who were in this part of the field with Demosthenes, did most of the work. Meanwhile the Ambraciots and the others on the right wing defeated the troops facing them and pursued them toward Argos; for they happen to be the most warlike people in that part of the world. But as they came back and saw that the main body had been defeated, and the rest of the Acarnanians pressed them, they barely got through to Olpae, and many of them were killed, rushing in without order or discipline, except the Mantineans, who kept their ranks better than any in the whole army as they withdrew. The battle ended in the evening.

109 The next day Menedaius, since Eurylochus and Macarius had been killed, took over the command himself. After so great a defeat he did not know how he could either stay and stand a siege, cut off as he was by land and by sea by the Attic ships, or withdraw in safety. So he made proposals to Demosthenes and the Acarnanian generals for a truce and a withdrawal, and at the same time for the recovery of the dead. They gave back the dead, set up a trophy themselves, and took up their own dead, about three hundred. They would not grant a withdrawal openly to all. But Demosthenes and his fellow generals of the Acarnanians made a secret agreement with the Mantineans, Menedaius, and the other Peloponnesian commanders and the most important men among them, allowing them to leave quickly. He wanted to strip the Ambraciots and the mercenary rabble of their support, and above all to discredit the Lacedaemonians and the Peloponnesians among the Hellenes of that region as men who had betrayed their allies and put their own interests first. So the Peloponnesians took up their dead, buried them hastily as best they could, and those who had been granted permission secretly planned their withdrawal.

110 Demosthenes and the Acarnanians now received word that the Ambraciots from the city, in response to the first message from Olpae, were coming to help in full force through Amphilochia, intending to join their men at Olpae, and knew nothing of what had happened. He at once sent part of his army ahead to lay ambushes on the roads and seize the strong points, and at the same time prepared to march against them with the rest of his force.

111 In the meantime the Mantineans and the others included in the agreement went out on the pretext of gathering vegetables and firewood, and slipped away in small groups, picking up as they went the things they had supposedly come out for. When they had got some way from Olpae, they went off more quickly. The Ambraciots and the others who happened to have come out with them in a body, when they realized that they were leaving, rushed after them at a run, wanting to catch up. At first the Acarnanians thought that all of them alike were leaving without any agreement, and pursued the Peloponnesians. When some of their generals tried to stop them and said that there was an agreement with these men, one soldier threw a javelin at them, thinking they were being betrayed. Afterward, however, they let the Mantineans and the Peloponnesians go and killed the Ambraciots. There was much dispute and uncertainty whether a man was an Ambraciot or a Peloponnesian. They killed some two hundred of them; the rest escaped to the neighboring territory of the Agraeans, where Salynthius, the king of the Agraeans, who was friendly to them, took them in.

112 Meanwhile the Ambraciots from the city reached Idomene. Idomene consists of two high hills. The men sent ahead by Demosthenes from the camp seized the larger of the two after nightfall, unobserved and before the enemy could get there; the Ambraciots had happened to climb the smaller one first and had camped there. After supper Demosthenes set out with the rest of the army at once, as soon as it was evening, he himself with half of it toward the pass, the other half through the Amphilochian hills. At first light he fell on the Ambraciots while they were still in their beds. They had no idea what had happened and took the attackers much rather for their own men; for Demosthenes had purposely put the Messenians in front and told them to call out to the enemy in their Doric dialect and so win the trust of the sentries, who could not make them out by sight, since it was still night. So when he fell on their army, they routed it and killed most of them on the spot; the rest fled into the mountains. But the roads had been occupied in advance, and the Amphilochians knew their own country and were light-armed against hoplites, while the Ambraciots did not know it and had no idea which way to turn. They fell into ravines and into the ambushes that had been laid for them, and were destroyed. They tried every way of escape, and some even turned toward the sea, which was not far off; and seeing the Attic ships sailing along the coast just as the action was taking place, they swam out to them, thinking in the fear of the moment that it was better, if they must die, to be killed by the men in the ships than by the barbarian Amphilochians, their bitterest enemies. In this way the Ambraciots were cut to pieces, and few out of many got back safely to their city. The Acarnanians stripped the dead, set up trophies, and returned to Argos.

113 The next day a herald came to them from the Ambraciots who had fled from Olpae to the Agraeans, to ask for the recovery of the dead who had been killed after the first battle, when they had come out with the Mantineans and the others who were under the agreement, though they were not included in it themselves. When the herald saw the arms of the Ambraciots from the city, he was amazed at their number; he did not know of the disaster, but thought they belonged to the men of his own party. Someone asked him what he was amazed at and how many of their men had been killed, the questioner in turn supposing that the herald came from the men at Idomene. The herald said about two hundred. The questioner answered, “These arms do not look like it; they look like more than a thousand.” The herald said again, “Then they are not the arms of those who fought with us.” The other replied, “They are, if it was you who fought at Idomene yesterday.” “But we fought with no one yesterday; it was the day before, in the retreat.” “Well, we certainly fought these men yesterday, the ones who came to help from the city of Ambracia.” When the herald heard this and understood that the relief force from the city had been destroyed, he cried out in grief and, stunned by the magnitude of the disaster, went away at once without doing what he had come for, and no longer asked for the dead. This was indeed the greatest disaster to befall any single Hellenic city in so few days in the whole of this war. I have not recorded the number of the dead, because the number said to have been lost is incredible in proportion to the size of the city. I do know this, that if the Acarnanians and Amphilochians had been willing to follow the advice of the Athenians and Demosthenes and destroy Ambracia, they would have taken it at the first assault. But they were afraid that if the Athenians held it they would be more troublesome neighbors than the Ambraciots.

114 After this they allotted a third of the spoils to the Athenians and divided the rest among their cities. The Athenians’ share was captured at sea; the arms that are now dedicated in the Attic temples are three hundred full suits of armor that were set aside for Demosthenes, and he brought them home with him when he sailed. After his disaster in Aetolia, this success made his return less dangerous. The Athenians in the twenty ships also went back to Naupactus. After the Athenians and Demosthenes had gone, the Acarnanians and Amphilochians made a truce with the Ambraciots and Peloponnesians who had fled to Salynthius and the Agraeans, allowing them to withdraw from Oeniadae, to which they had moved from Salynthius’ country. For the future the Acarnanians and Amphilochians made a treaty and alliance with the Ambraciots for a hundred years, on these terms: the Ambraciots were not to join the Acarnanians in making war on the Peloponnesians, nor the Acarnanians to join the Ambraciots against the Athenians; each was to help defend the other’s territory; the Ambraciots were to give back whatever places or hostages of the Amphilochians they held; and they were not to help Anactorium, which was at war with the Acarnanians. Having agreed to these terms, they brought the war to an end. After this the Corinthians sent a garrison of their own to Ambracia, about three hundred hoplites, under the command of Xenocleidas son of Euthycles; they made their way overland with difficulty and arrived. That was how things went at Ambracia.

115 The same winter the Athenians in Sicily made a landing from their ships in the territory of Himera, in concert with the Sicels, who had invaded the borders of Himera from the interior, and they also sailed against the islands of Aeolus. When they returned to Rhegium, they found there the Athenian general Pythodorus son of Isolochus, who had come to take over the command of the ships from Laches. The allies in Sicily had sailed to Athens and persuaded the Athenians to send them help with more ships. For the Syracusans were masters of their land, and although they were themselves kept off the sea by a few ships, they were gathering a fleet and preparing not to put up with this. The Athenians began manning forty ships to send them, thinking that the war there would be ended sooner, and at the same time wanting to give their navy practice. So they sent off one of the generals, Pythodorus, with a few ships, and were about to send Sophocles son of Sostratides and Eurymedon son of Thucles with the main fleet. Pythodorus, having now taken over Laches’ command of the ships, sailed at the end of the winter against the Locrian fort that Laches had taken earlier, and was defeated in battle by the Locrians and withdrew.

116 At about the beginning of this spring the stream of fire flowed from Etna, as it had before, and destroyed some of the land of the Catanaeans, who live below Mount Etna, the largest mountain in Sicily. This eruption is said to have come fifty years after the previous one, and in all there have been three since Sicily was settled by the Hellenes.¹¹ These things happened during this winter; and so ended the sixth year of this war, which Thucydides recorded.

Notes

1. 1. The Olympic festival of 428 BC. Dorieus of Rhodes, a famous boxer and wrestler, won the pancratium three times running.

2. 2. Many editors regard chapter 17 as an insertion, possibly displaced from the account of the war’s first year; the text of its first sentence is also corrupt. It is given here in brackets, as in the edition followed.

3. 3. Pissuthnes, the Persian satrap at Sardis, governor of the King’s province of western Asia Minor.

4. 4. Cleon, the leading popular politician at Athens after the death of Pericles (429 BC); this is his first appearance in the History.

5. 5. The figure has been doubted, and some editors would emend it to a much smaller number; the manuscripts agree on “a little more than a thousand.”

6. 6. Plataea’s alliance with Athens is usually dated to 519 BC; its fall here belongs to the summer of 427 BC.

7. 7. The Corcyraean prisoners taken by Corinth in the fighting over Epidamnus in 433 BC (Book 1, chapter 55).

8. 8. Chapter 84 was already doubted in antiquity, and many editors consider it an imitation of chapter 82 by a later hand. It is given in brackets, as in the edition followed.

9. 9. The first Athenian expedition to Sicily (427 BC), a forerunner of the great expedition of 415 BC described in Books 6 and 7.

10. 10. Delos, the sacred island of Apollo in the Cyclades, was the original seat of the Athenian-led alliance. The verses quoted below come from the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, which Thucydides, like his contemporaries, ascribes to Homer.

11. 11. The eruption described here took place in 425 BC; the previous one is usually dated to about 475 BC.