Book 4

1 The following summer, about the time the grain puts out its ears, ten Syracusan ships and an equal number from Locri sailed to Messana in Sicily and took the city, at the invitation of the Messanians themselves; and Messana revolted from the Athenians. The Syracusans did this chiefly because they saw that the place gave access to Sicily and feared that the Athenians might one day use it as a base to come against them with a larger force; the Locrians did it out of enmity toward the Rhegians, wanting to make war on them from both sides. The Locrians had at the same time invaded the territory of Rhegium in full force, so that the Rhegians could not go to the aid of the Messanians, and also because Rhegian exiles who were with them urged them on; for Rhegium had been torn by civil strife for a long time and was unable for the present to defend itself against the Locrians, which was one more reason for attacking it. After laying the land waste, the Locrians withdrew their infantry, while the ships stayed to guard Messana; and others that were being manned were to anchor there and carry on the war from that base.

2 At about the same time in the spring, before the grain was ripe, the Peloponnesians and their allies invaded Attica (they were led by Agis son of Archidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians), and they settled in and laid waste the land. The Athenians sent off the forty ships to Sicily, as they had been preparing to do, and the remaining generals, Eurymedon and Sophocles; for Pythodorus, the third of them, had already gone ahead to Sicily. They also instructed the generals to look after the Corcyraeans in the city on their way past, since these were being raided by the exiles on the mountain; sixty Peloponnesian ships had sailed there to support the men on the mountain, expecting, because there was a great famine in the city, to get control of affairs easily. Demosthenes, who had held no office since his return from Acarnania, had asked to be allowed to use these ships around the Peloponnese, and they told him he might, if he wished.

3 When they were off the coast of Laconia and learned that the Peloponnesian ships were already at Corcyra, Eurymedon and Sophocles wanted to hurry on to Corcyra, but Demosthenes urged them to put in first at Pylos, do what was needed there, and then make the voyage. While they were objecting, a storm happened to come up and carried the ships into Pylos. Demosthenes at once asked them to fortify the place (that, he said, was why he had come along on the voyage), and he pointed out that there was a great supply of timber and stone, that the place was strong by nature, and that both it and much of the country around it were deserted. Pylos is about four hundred stades from Sparta and lies in what was once Messenian land; the Lacedaemonians call it Coryphasium.¹ The generals said there were many deserted headlands in the Peloponnese if he wanted to occupy them and spend the city’s money. But to him this place seemed different from any other: it had a harbor, and the Messenians, who had belonged to it from of old and spoke the same dialect as the Lacedaemonians, could do them the greatest harm using it as a base, and would at the same time be reliable guards of the place.

4 When he could persuade neither the generals nor the soldiers, and later also failed after laying the plan before the taxiarchs, he waited idle, because the weather kept them from sailing, until the soldiers themselves, having nothing to do, were seized by an impulse to gather around and fortify the place. They set to work. They had no iron tools for cutting stone, but they brought stones picked out by hand and set each one wherever it would fit; and where mud was needed, for lack of hods they carried it on their backs, bending forward so that it would stay on as well as possible and locking their hands behind them so that it would not slip off. They hurried in every way they could to finish the most vulnerable points before the Lacedaemonians could come to the rescue; for most of the place was strong in itself and needed no wall.

5 The Lacedaemonians happened to be celebrating a festival, and when they heard the news they made light of it, thinking that when they marched out the Athenians would either not wait for them or that they would easily take the place by force; and the fact that their army was still at Athens also held them back somewhat. The Athenians fortified the side of the place facing the mainland and the points where it was most needed in six days; then they left Demosthenes there with five ships to guard it and hurried on with the greater part of the fleet on their voyage to Corcyra and Sicily.

6 When the Peloponnesians in Attica learned that Pylos had been occupied, they went home in haste, the Lacedaemonians and King Agis thinking that the affair at Pylos touched them closely. Besides, they had invaded early, while the grain was still green, and most of them were short of food; and bad weather, colder than usual for the season, came on and distressed the army. So for many reasons it came about that they withdrew early and that this invasion was the shortest; they stayed in Attica fifteen days.

7 At about the same time Simonides, an Athenian general, collected a few Athenians from the garrisons and a large number of the allies in that region and took Eion in the Thracian region, a colony of Mende that was hostile to Athens, which was being betrayed to him. But the Chalcidians and Bottiaeans came at once to its aid, and he was driven out and lost many of his soldiers.

8 When the Peloponnesians had withdrawn from Attica, the Spartiates themselves and the nearest of the Perioeci set out at once for Pylos, but the other Lacedaemonians were slower to come, having just returned from another campaign. They also sent word around the Peloponnese to come to Pylos as quickly as possible, and they sent for their sixty ships at Corcyra; these were hauled across the isthmus of Leucas, slipped past the Attic ships at Zacynthus without being seen, and arrived at Pylos, where the land army was already present. While the Peloponnesians were still sailing up, Demosthenes managed to send off two ships in time to tell Eurymedon and the Athenians on the ships at Zacynthus to come, since the place was in danger. The ships sailed in haste as Demosthenes had instructed; and the Lacedaemonians prepared to attack the fort by land and by sea, expecting to take with ease a structure built in a hurry and held by few men. But since they also expected relief from the Attic ships at Zacynthus, they intended, if they did not take the place first, to block the entrances of the harbor as well, so that the Athenians could not anchor in it. For the island called Sphacteria, stretching along the harbor and lying close in front of it, makes the harbor secure and the entrances narrow: on one side there is a passage for two ships, by the Athenian fort and Pylos, and on the other, toward the rest of the mainland, for eight or nine. The island was wooded throughout and, being uninhabited, had no paths, and it was about fifteen stades in length. They intended to close the entrances with ships packed side by side, prows facing outward. As for the island, they feared the enemy might use it to make war on them, so they carried hoplites across to it and posted others along the mainland. In this way, they reasoned, both the island and the mainland would be hostile to the Athenians, and the mainland offered no landing (the coast of Pylos itself outside the entrance, facing the open sea, had no harbors, so the Athenians would have nowhere to set out from to help their men); and they themselves would in all likelihood take the place by siege, without a sea battle and without risk, since there was no grain inside and it had been occupied with little preparation. When they had decided this, they began carrying the hoplites across to the island, choosing them by lot from all the companies. Others had crossed before in relays, but the last group, the men who were caught there, numbered 420, with the Helots who attended them; their commander was Epitadas son of Molobrus.

9 Demosthenes, seeing that the Lacedaemonians were about to attack with ships and infantry together, made his own preparations. He hauled up under the fort the triremes that remained to him from the squadron left there and protected them with a stockade, and he armed their sailors with poor shields, most of them made of wicker; for it was impossible to get arms in a deserted place, and even these they had taken from a Messenian privateer, a thirty-oared ship and a light boat, that happened to come by. There were about forty hoplites among these Messenians, and he used them with the rest. He posted most of his men, both unarmed and armed, at the fortified and strongest points of the place, facing the mainland, with orders to drive back the infantry if it attacked. He himself picked out sixty hoplites and a few archers from the whole force and went outside the wall toward the sea, where he most expected the enemy to try to land. The ground there was difficult and rocky and faced the open sea, but because the wall was weakest at that point he thought they would be eager to force a way in; for the Athenians, never expecting to be beaten at sea, had not built a strong wall there, and if the enemy forced a landing the place could be taken. So he went to that point, down to the very edge of the sea, and drew up his hoplites to keep them off if he could, and he encouraged them as follows.

10 “Men who have joined me in this danger, let none of you, in a crisis like this, want to look clever by counting up all the peril that surrounds us; rather, go straight at the enemy without weighing the odds, full of hope, and expect to come through this as well. Where things have reached necessity, as here, there is no room for calculation; what is needed is to face the danger as quickly as possible. I see that most of the advantages are on our side, if we are willing to stand firm and not, struck with fear at their numbers, throw away the advantages we have. I count the difficulty of landing here as ours: if we stand our ground it becomes our ally, but if we give way, then however hard the ground is, it will be easy going with no one to stop them, and we shall find the enemy more dangerous, because his retreat will not be easy if we press him hard. (On their ships they are easiest to fight off; once landed, they are on equal terms with us.) Nor must we fear their numbers too much. Large as their force is, it will fight a few at a time, because there is nowhere to bring the ships to shore; and it is not an army on land, superior on equal terms, but one fighting from ships, which need many things to go right at sea. So I consider their difficulties a match for our numbers. And at the same time I ask of you, as Athenians who know from experience of landing from ships on other men’s shores that a landing can never be forced if the defender stands his ground and does not give way out of fear of the surf and of the terror of ships bearing in, that you now stand firm yourselves and, fighting off the enemy at the water’s very edge, save both yourselves and the place.”

11 When Demosthenes had encouraged them in this way, the Athenians took more heart, and they went down and formed up along the very edge of the sea. The Lacedaemonians set out and attacked the fort with their land army and at the same time with their ships, which numbered forty-three; their admiral, who sailed with them, was the Spartiate Thrasymelidas son of Cratesicles. He attacked just where Demosthenes had expected. The Athenians defended themselves on both sides, from the land and from the sea. The enemy divided their ships into small groups, because it was not possible for more to put in, and, resting by turns, kept making their attacks, with all their energy and with shouts of encouragement, in the hope that they might somehow force their way in and take the fort. Brasidas was the most conspicuous of all. He was commanding a trireme, and when he saw that, because the ground was difficult, the trierarchs and helmsmen were hanging back even where a landing seemed possible, and were taking care not to wreck their ships, he shouted at them that it made no sense to spare timber and let the enemy build a fort in their country. He ordered them to break up their own ships to force a landing, and he told the allies not to shrink from giving up their ships to the Lacedaemonians at this moment in return for the great benefits they had received, but to run them aground, get ashore by any means, and make themselves masters of the men and the place.

12 He was urging the others on in this way, and he forced his own helmsman to run his ship aground and went to the gangway. As he tried to land he was beaten back by the Athenians; after receiving many wounds he fainted, and as he fell onto the outrigger his shield slipped off into the sea. It was carried ashore, and the Athenians picked it up and later used it for the trophy they set up for this attack. The rest were eager, but they could not land, because of the difficulty of the ground and because the Athenians held fast and gave no ground at all. Fortune had turned things around so far that the Athenians were fighting off the Lacedaemonians from the land, and Laconian land at that, while the Lacedaemonians sailed against it, and the Lacedaemonians were trying to land from ships on their own country, now hostile, against the Athenians. For at that time a great part of the reputation of the one people was that they were above all a land power and the strongest in infantry, and of the other that they were a sea power and far superior with ships.

13 After making attacks that day and part of the next, they stopped. On the third day they sent some of their ships to Asine for timber for siege engines, hoping that, although the wall by the harbor was high, they could take it with engines, since there landing was easiest. Meanwhile the Athenian ships from Zacynthus arrived, forty in number; for some of the guard ships from Naupactus and four Chian ships had joined them. When they saw the mainland and the island full of hoplites, and the ships in the harbor making no move to come out, they were at a loss where to anchor. For the moment they sailed to the island of Prote, which is not far off and is uninhabited, and camped there; the next day they put out, prepared for a sea battle, intending to fight in open water if the enemy were willing to come out against them, and if not, to sail in themselves. The Lacedaemonians did not put out to meet them, nor had they, as it turned out, done what they had planned, which was to block the entrances. They stayed quietly on land, manning their ships and getting ready, if anyone sailed in, to fight in the harbor, which was not a small one.

14 The Athenians, seeing this, rushed at them through both entrances. Falling on most of the enemy ships, which were already afloat and facing them, they put them to flight, and in the pursuit, which was short, they damaged many and took five, one of them with its crew; and they rammed the rest, which had fled to the shore. Some ships were struck while their crews were still going aboard, before they could put out; and the Athenians tied ropes to some empty ones and towed them off, their crews having fled. Seeing this, and in agony at the disaster, because their men were being cut off on the island, the Lacedaemonians came to help. They waded into the sea in their armor, seized hold of the ships, and pulled them back; and in this struggle each man thought that wherever he was not taking part himself, the effort was being held back. There was great confusion, and the usual roles of the two sides around the ships were reversed: the Lacedaemonians, in their eagerness and dismay, were fighting a sea battle, so to speak, from the land, while the Athenians, winning and wanting to push their present good fortune as far as possible, were fighting a land battle from ships. After giving each other much trouble and inflicting wounds, they separated, and the Lacedaemonians saved their empty ships, apart from those taken at the start. Both sides returned to their camps. The Athenians set up a trophy, gave back the dead, and took possession of the wrecks, and at once began sailing round the island and keeping it under guard, since the men on it were cut off; while the Peloponnesians on the mainland, now joined by reinforcements from every quarter, stayed where they were at Pylos.

15 When the news of what had happened at Pylos reached Sparta, they decided that, since this was a great disaster, the authorities should go down to the camp and decide on the spot, seeing things for themselves, whatever seemed best. When they saw that it was impossible to help the men, and they were unwilling to run the risk that they might either suffer from hunger or be overpowered by numbers and taken, they decided to make a truce at Pylos with the Athenian generals, if they were willing, and to send envoys to Athens about an agreement and try to recover the men as quickly as possible.

16 The generals accepted the proposal, and a truce was made on these terms. The Lacedaemonians were to bring to Pylos and hand over to the Athenians the ships with which they had fought and all the warships in Laconia, and were not to bear arms against the fort by land or by sea. The Athenians were to allow the Lacedaemonians on the mainland to send to the men on the island a fixed amount of grain, already kneaded: two Attic choenixes of barley meal for each man, two cotylae of wine,² and a piece of meat, and half these rations for a servant. These were to be sent in under the eyes of the Athenians, and no boat was to sail in secretly. The Athenians were to keep guarding the island no less than before, but without landing on it, and were not to bear arms against the Peloponnesian army by land or by sea. If either side broke any of these terms in any way at all, the truce was at once to be void. It was to hold until the Lacedaemonian envoys returned from Athens; the Athenians were to take them there in a trireme and bring them back. When they returned, this truce was to end, and the Athenians were to give back the ships in the same condition as they received them. The truce was made on these terms, the ships were handed over, about sixty of them, and the envoys were sent off. When they arrived at Athens, they spoke as follows.

17 “Athenians, the Lacedaemonians have sent us about the men on the island, to arrange whatever we can persuade you is to your advantage and will at the same time, as matters now stand, bring us the most honor possible in our misfortune. If we speak at some length, it will not be against our custom; it is our native way not to use many words where few will do, but to use more when the moment calls for showing something important and so accomplishing, by words, what has to be done. Take what we say not in a hostile spirit, nor as though you were being taught like men without understanding, but as a reminder, offered to those who know, of how to decide well. You can put your present good fortune to good use, keeping what you hold and gaining honor and glory besides, and avoid what happens to men who come into some good thing they are not used to: they always reach out for more in hope, because their present good fortune also came unexpectedly. But those who have met with the most reversals both ways have every reason to be the most distrustful of success; and that is a lesson your city, from experience, and we above all, might reasonably have learned.

18 “You can see it by looking at our present misfortunes. We, who have the highest standing among the Hellenes, have come to you, when formerly we thought we were the ones with the power to grant what we have now come to ask of you. Yet this did not happen to us from any lack of strength, nor because some increase of strength made us overbearing; we were deceived in our judgment about the resources we always had, a thing that can happen to anyone alike. So it would not be reasonable for you, because of the strength your city now has and what it has gained, to think that fortune too will always be on your side. Prudent men put their good things safely aside, knowing they are uncertain (such men would also meet misfortune more wisely), and they recognize that war does not go along with whatever part of it a man chooses to handle, but goes where chance leads it. Such men will stumble least, because they are not carried away by trust in their success, and they will be most willing to come to terms while they are fortunate. That is what you would do well to do now, Athenians, with us, and not have it thought later, if you refuse and then meet with failure, as you very well may, that even your present successes were won by chance, when you might leave behind you, without risk, a reputation for strength and good sense for the future.

19 “The Lacedaemonians invite you to make a treaty and end the war. They offer peace, an alliance, and friendship and close relations in every other way; and in return they ask for the men on the island, thinking it better for both sides that the matter not be fought out to the end, whether the men escape by force, if some way of safety should turn up, or are reduced by siege and captured. We think that great hatreds are most surely ended, not when one side retaliates and, having gained the upper hand in most of the war, binds the other by forced oaths to an agreement on unequal terms, but when, though able to do just that, he takes the course of fairness, outdoes the other in generosity, and makes peace on moderate terms beyond what the other expected. For then the enemy owes him, not revenge for having been forced, but generosity in return, and shame makes him readier to keep what he agreed. Men do this more toward their greatest enemies than toward those with whom they have had only moderate differences; and it is their nature to give way gladly in turn to those who yield of their own accord, but against arrogance to run every risk, even against their own judgment.

20 “For both of us, if ever, it is a good moment for reconciliation, before something irreparable happens in the meantime and overtakes us. Then we must hold toward you an eternal hatred, personal as well as public, and you must lose what we are now offering. While the issue is still undecided, while you gain glory and our friendship besides, and we, before anything shameful has happened, settle our misfortune on moderate terms, let us be reconciled. Let us choose peace instead of war for ourselves, and give the other Hellenes a rest from their troubles; they will consider you the more responsible for it. Now they are at war without knowing clearly which side began it; but if the war is ended, and you are now chiefly the ones who decide that, they will give the credit to you. If you decide for it, you can become firm friends of the Lacedaemonians, since they themselves are inviting it and you would be doing them a favor rather than forcing them. Consider how many good things are likely to follow from this: if we and you speak with one voice, you may be sure that the rest of Hellas, being weaker, will pay us the highest respect.”

21 That was what the Lacedaemonians said, thinking that the Athenians had wanted a treaty in the past and had been prevented by their own opposition, and that now, when peace was offered, they would gladly accept it and give back the men. But the Athenians thought that as long as they held the men on the island, a treaty was already theirs whenever they chose to make one with the Lacedaemonians, and they reached out for more. The man who pushed them most was Cleon son of Cleaenetus, a popular leader at that time and the most persuasive with the people. He persuaded them to answer that the men on the island must first surrender their arms and themselves and be brought to Athens; then, when they had come, the Lacedaemonians must give back Nisaea, Pegae, Troezen, and Achaea, which they had not taken in war but had got under the earlier agreement,³ when the Athenians gave them up because of their misfortunes and were then rather in need of a treaty; and then they could recover the men and make a treaty for as long as both sides thought fit.

22 The envoys made no objection to this answer but asked them to choose commissioners to meet with them, who would discuss each point, speaking and listening, and come quietly to whatever terms they could persuade each other to accept. At this Cleon came down hard on them. He said he had known before that they had nothing honest in mind, and it was clear now, since they were unwilling to say anything before the people and wanted to sit in council with a few men; if they meant anything sound, he told them to say it in front of everyone. The Lacedaemonians saw that they could not speak before the people, even if their misfortune led them to think some concession advisable, for fear that if they spoke and failed they would be discredited with their allies; and they saw that the Athenians would not grant what they asked on moderate terms. So they left Athens with nothing done.

23 When they returned, the truce at Pylos was at once at an end, and the Lacedaemonians asked for their ships back as had been agreed. But the Athenians charged them with an attack on the fort in breach of the truce and with other things that did not seem worth mentioning, and refused to give them back, insisting that it had been stated that the truce would be void if it were broken in any way at all. The Lacedaemonians protested, called the business of the ships an injustice, and went away and resumed the war. Both sides now fought at Pylos with all their strength. The Athenians kept two ships always sailing around the island in opposite directions by day (at night all their ships lay at anchor around it, except on the seaward side when there was wind; and twenty more ships came from Athens to join the guard, so that there were seventy in all); and the Peloponnesians stayed encamped on the mainland and made attacks on the fort, watching for any chance that might come to save the men.

24 Meanwhile in Sicily the Syracusans and their allies brought up the rest of the fleet they had been preparing to join the ships on guard at Messana, and carried on the war from Messana. The Locrians urged them on most, out of enmity toward the Rhegians, and they themselves had also invaded Rhegian territory in full force. They wanted to try a sea battle, seeing that the Athenians had only a few ships on the spot and hearing that the larger number that was to come was blockading the island. If they won at sea, they hoped to blockade Rhegium by land and sea and take it easily, and then their position would be strong at once; for since the promontory of Rhegium in Italy and Messana in Sicily lie close together, the Athenians would not be able to keep station there and control the strait. The strait is the sea between Rhegium and Messana, where Sicily is nearest to the mainland; this is the so-called Charybdis, through which Odysseus is said to have sailed. Because it is narrow and the sea rushes into it from two great seas, the Tyrrhenian and the Sicilian, and runs in strong currents, it has with good reason been thought dangerous.

25 In this narrow water, then, the Syracusans and their allies, with a little more than thirty ships, were forced late in the day to fight over a boat that was crossing, putting out against sixteen Athenian ships and eight from Rhegium. They were beaten by the Athenians and sailed off in haste, each to their own camp, the one at Messana or the one at Rhegium, as each happened to be, having lost one ship; and night came on during the action. After this the Locrians left Rhegian territory, and the ships of the Syracusans and their allies assembled and anchored at Pelorus in the territory of Messana, where their infantry joined them. The Athenians and Rhegians sailed up, and seeing the ships unmanned, attacked them; but a grappling iron was thrown onto one of their own ships and they lost it, though the crew swam away. After this the Syracusans went aboard their ships and were being towed along the shore toward Messana, when the Athenians attacked again; but the Syracusans swung out to sea, struck first, and the Athenians lost another ship. Having held their own in the voyage along the coast and in a sea battle of this kind, the Syracusans went on into the harbor at Messana. The Athenians, hearing that Camarina was being betrayed to the Syracusans by Archias and his party, sailed there. Meanwhile the Messanians marched in full force by land, and with their ships at the same time, against their neighbor Naxos, a Chalcidian city. On the first day they forced the Naxians inside their walls and laid waste their land; on the next they sailed around with their ships and laid waste the land along the river Acesines, while their infantry made an attack on the city. Meanwhile the Sicels came down from the heights in large numbers to help against the Messanians. When the Naxians saw them, they took courage, urging one another on with the cry that the Leontines and their other Hellenic allies were coming to their aid; they suddenly ran out of the city, fell on the Messanians, routed them, and killed more than a thousand, and the rest got home with difficulty, for the barbarians fell on them along the roads and killed most of them. The ships put in at Messana and later dispersed, each to its own home. The Leontines and their allies, with the Athenians, at once marched against Messana, thinking it had been weakened; they attacked, the Athenians trying the harbor with their ships while the infantry went against the city. But the Messanians, with some Locrians under Demoteles who had been left there as a garrison after the disaster, made a sally, fell on them suddenly, routed most of the Leontine army, and killed many. When the Athenians saw this, they landed from their ships and came to help, fell on the Messanians while they were in disorder, and chased them back into the city; and they set up a trophy and went back to Rhegium. After this the Hellenes in Sicily campaigned against one another by land without the Athenians.

26 At Pylos the Athenians were still besieging the Lacedaemonians on the island, and the Peloponnesian army on the mainland stayed where it was. The blockade was hard on the Athenians because of the lack of food and water. There was no spring except one on the acropolis of Pylos itself, and that not a large one; most of them scraped away the shingle on the beach and drank such water as you would expect. They were cramped, camping in a small space, and since the ships had no anchorage, some took their meals on land in turn while the others lay at anchor offshore. What discouraged them most was the time it was taking, beyond all calculation; they had expected to starve out within a few days men who were on a deserted island and had only brackish water to drink. The cause was that the Lacedaemonians had called for volunteers to bring into the island ground grain, wine, cheese, and any other food that might be useful in a siege, offering a high price in silver and promising freedom to any Helot who brought supplies in. Many took the risk, the Helots above all, setting out from any point of the Peloponnese they could and running in by night to the seaward side of the island. They watched especially for a wind to carry them in; for they slipped past the guard of triremes more easily when the wind was blowing from the sea, since it became impossible for the ships to keep station around the island, while the Helots landed with no thought for the cost; for they ran their boats aground, the value of which had been assessed in money beforehand, and the hoplites on the island kept watch at the landing places. But all who ventured in calm weather were caught. Divers also swam in underwater by way of the harbor, towing by a cord skins filled with poppy seed mixed with honey and pounded linseed; at first they went unnoticed, but later guards were posted. Each side used every device, the one to send the food in, the other to stop it from getting through unnoticed.

27 At Athens, when they learned that the army was in difficulties and that food was getting through to the men on the island, they were at a loss and afraid that winter would overtake them while they were still on guard. They saw that it would be impossible to bring supplies around the Peloponnese, especially to a deserted place, when even in summer they could not send around enough, and that the blockade could not be kept up where there were no harbors. Either the guard would be relaxed and the men would survive, or they would watch for bad weather and escape in the boats that brought them their food. Above all they were afraid of the Lacedaemonians, because they thought that, since they had something strong to rely on, they were no longer sending heralds to them; and they regretted not accepting the treaty. Cleon, knowing that they suspected him of having blocked the agreement, said that those who brought the news were not telling the truth. The messengers who had come advised them, if they did not believe them, to send some inspectors, and the Athenians chose Cleon himself as an inspector, together with Theagenes. Seeing that he would be forced either to report the same things as the men he was accusing or to be shown a liar if he said the opposite, and seeing too that the Athenians were rather inclined in their minds to send an expedition, he advised them not to send inspectors or delay and let the opportunity slip, but, if they thought the reports were true, to sail against the men. And he pointed at Nicias son of Niceratus, who was a general, being his enemy and taunting him: it was easy, he said, if the generals were men, to sail with a force and take the men on the island, and he himself, if he were in command, would do it.

28 Nicias, since the Athenians had started to raise an outcry against Cleon, asking why he did not sail now if it seemed so easy to him, and since he saw that Cleon was taunting him, told him to take whatever force he wanted and make the attempt, as far as the generals were concerned. Cleon at first thought he was giving up the command only in word and was ready to accept; but when he realized that Nicias really meant to hand it over, he drew back and said that Nicias, not he, was general. He was frightened now and had not thought Nicias would dare to give way to him. But Nicias again urged him, resigned the command at Pylos, and called the Athenians to witness. The Athenians, as a crowd is apt to do, urged Nicias all the more to hand over the command, and shouted all the more at Cleon to sail, the more he tried to escape the voyage and back out of what he had said. So, unable any longer to get out of what he had said, he undertook the voyage. He came forward and said that he was not afraid of the Lacedaemonians, and that he would sail without taking a single man from the city, only the Lemnians and Imbrians who were in Athens, the peltasts who had come to help from Aenus, and four hundred archers from other places. With these, he said, added to the soldiers at Pylos, within twenty days he would either bring the Lacedaemonians back alive or kill them there. The Athenians were somewhat amused at his empty boasting; still, the sensible men were pleased, reckoning that they would get one of two good things: either they would be rid of Cleon, which they rather expected, or, if they were wrong about that, he would put the Lacedaemonians in their hands.

29 When he had settled everything in the assembly and the Athenians had voted him the expedition, he chose one of the generals at Pylos, Demosthenes, as his colleague and put to sea in haste. He chose Demosthenes because he heard that he was planning a landing on the island. The soldiers, suffering from the hardships of the place and more besieged than besieging, were eager to risk a decisive action, and the burning of the island had given Demosthenes still more confidence. Before, since it was for the most part wooded and had no paths because it had always been uninhabited, he had been afraid, and he thought this was to the enemy’s advantage: if he landed a large army, they could attack it from cover and do it harm. His own side’s mistakes and preparations, he thought, would be fully visible to the enemy, while theirs would not be equally visible to him because of the woods; so the enemy could fall on them unexpectedly wherever they liked, since the choice of attack would be theirs. And if he forced his way into the thick woods to come to close quarters, he thought that a smaller force that knew the ground would be stronger than a larger one that did not; and his own army, large as it was, might be destroyed without knowing it, since the men would not be able to see where they needed to help one another.

30 It was not least the disaster in Aetolia, which had been caused in part by the woods, that brought these thoughts to his mind. But the soldiers were forced by the lack of space to land on the edges of the island and take their midday meal there with an outpost on guard, and one of them set fire to a little of the wood by accident; then a wind came up, and most of it burned down before anyone realized. In this way Demosthenes saw more clearly that the Lacedaemonians were more numerous than he had supposed when he suspected that the food was being sent in for fewer men, and that the island was easier to land on; and then, judging the prize worthy of a greater effort by the Athenians, he prepared the attack, sending for troops from the allies nearby and getting everything else ready. Cleon, who had sent a messenger ahead to say that he was coming, arrived at Pylos with the army he had asked for. When the two were together, they first sent a herald to the camp on the mainland, proposing that, if they wished, the Lacedaemonians should order the men on the island to surrender their arms and themselves without a fight, on condition that they would be kept under moderate guard until some general agreement was reached.

31 When they did not accept, the Athenians waited one day. On the next, they put to sea by night, after putting all the hoplites aboard a few ships, and a little before dawn they landed on both sides of the island, from the open sea and from the harbor, about eight hundred hoplites, and advanced at a run against the first guard post on the island. The enemy had been posted as follows. In this first post there were about thirty hoplites; the middle of the island, the most level part and around the water, was held by most of them, with Epitadas their commander; and a small detachment guarded the very end of the island, toward Pylos, which was sheer on the side of the sea and hardest of all to attack from the land. For there was also an old fort there, built of stones picked out by hand, which they thought would be of use to them if they were forced into a retreat. That was how they were posted.

32 The Athenians ran at the first guards and killed them at once, some still in their beds and others as they were taking up their arms; the landing had gone unnoticed, since the guards thought the ships were sailing as usual to their stations for the night. At daybreak the rest of the army also began landing: from a little more than seventy ships, all the crews except the lowest rank of rowers, each man armed as he could manage; eight hundred archers and no fewer peltasts; the Messenians who had come to help; and all the others who were holding the area around Pylos, except the guards on the wall. On Demosthenes’ orders they divided into groups of two hundred and more, in some places fewer, and occupied the highest points, so that the enemy, surrounded on every side, would be at the greatest possible loss and have nothing to form up against, but would be exposed to attack from many sides at once: if they advanced against those in front, they would be shot at from behind, and if against those on one flank, by those posted on the other. Wherever they went, the enemy would always be at their backs: light-armed troops, the hardest of all to deal with, whose strength lay in arrows, javelins, stones, and slings at long range, and whom it was impossible even to get at; for they won by running away and pressed hard when the enemy fell back. Such was the plan by which Demosthenes first conceived the landing and drew up his men in the action.

33 Epitadas and his men, who were the main body on the island, when they saw that the first post had been destroyed and an army was advancing on them, closed ranks and went against the Athenian hoplites, wanting to come to close quarters; for the hoplites were posted in front of them, and the light-armed troops on their flanks and behind. But they could not engage the hoplites or make use of their own experience; for the light-armed troops kept them off by shooting at them from both sides, and meanwhile the hoplites did not advance against them but stayed where they were. Wherever the light-armed troops ran in and pressed them hardest, the Lacedaemonians drove them back; but these turned and fought again, being lightly equipped men who easily got a head start in flight, over ground that was difficult and rough from having been uninhabited, where the Lacedaemonians, in their armor, could not pursue.

34 For a short time they skirmished with each other in this way. But when the Lacedaemonians could no longer dash out quickly where they were attacked, the light-armed troops saw that they were slowing in their defense. They had gained most of their confidence from the sight of their own numbers, many times greater than the enemy’s, and they had grown more used to the Lacedaemonians, who no longer seemed as terrible to them as before, since they had not at once suffered what they had expected when they first landed, their spirits cowed at the thought of going against Lacedaemonians. Now, scorning them, they raised a shout and rushed at them in a mass, pelting them with stones, arrows, and javelins, whatever each man had at hand. The shouting that came with the charge struck terror into men unused to this kind of fighting, and the ash from the newly burned wood rose up thick, so that it was impossible to see what was in front of you for the arrows and stones that came flying, with the ash, from so many men. At this point the action became hard for the Lacedaemonians. Their felt caps did not keep out the arrows; the javelin shafts had broken off in them where they were struck; and they could do nothing for themselves, since they were blocked from seeing ahead, could not hear the orders given among them for the louder shouting of the enemy, and with danger surrounding them on every side had no hope of any way to defend themselves and survive.

35 At last, as many were now wounded from always turning back and forth in the same place, they closed ranks and fell back to the fort at the end of the island, which was not far off, and to their own men on guard there. When they gave way, the light-armed troops, now bolder still, pressed on them with much louder shouting. All the Lacedaemonians who were caught as they retreated were killed, but most of them escaped to the fort, and with the guards stationed there they formed up all along it to defend it wherever it could be attacked. The Athenians followed, but because the place was strong they could not go around and encircle them, so they came at them from the front and tried to drive them back. For a long time, most of the day, both sides held out, worn down by the fighting, by thirst, and by the sun, the one side trying to drive the enemy off the height, the other not to give way. The Lacedaemonians defended themselves more easily than before, since they could not be encircled on the flanks.

36 When there was no end to it, the commander of the Messenians came to Cleon and Demosthenes and told them that they were laboring in vain; but if they would give him some of the archers and the light-armed troops to go around behind the enemy by whatever path he could find, he thought he could force the approach. He was given what he asked for and set out from a point out of sight, so that the enemy would not see him. Making his way along the cliffs of the island wherever they gave a foothold, and where the Lacedaemonians, trusting in the strength of the ground, had posted no guard, he got around with great difficulty and barely, without being noticed, and suddenly appeared on the height behind them. He struck the enemy with terror by the surprise, and greatly strengthened his own side, who saw what they had been waiting for. The Lacedaemonians were now under fire from both sides, and had fallen into the same predicament, to compare small things with great, as the men at Thermopylae; for those were destroyed when the Persians came around by the path, and these, now attacked from both sides, no longer held out. Fighting few against many, and weak in body from lack of food, they began to give ground, and the Athenians were now masters of the approaches.

37 Cleon and Demosthenes, seeing that if the Lacedaemonians gave way even a little more they would be destroyed by their army, stopped the fighting and held their own men back. They wanted to bring them to Athens alive, in case, on hearing the herald’s proclamation, their resolve might break, so that they would surrender their arms and yield to the danger they were in. So they proclaimed that the Lacedaemonians might, if they wished, surrender their arms and themselves to the Athenians, to be dealt with as the Athenians should decide.

38 On hearing this, most of them lowered their shields and waved their hands above their heads, showing that they accepted the proclamation. After this, a halt in the fighting was made, and Cleon and Demosthenes met for talks with Styphon son of Pharax for the Lacedaemonians. Of the earlier commanders, the first, Epitadas, had been killed, and the man chosen to succeed him, Hippagretas, was lying among the dead, still alive but taken for dead; Styphon himself had been chosen third in command, according to the law, in case anything happened to the others. Styphon and those with him said that they wanted to send a herald across to the Lacedaemonians on the mainland to ask what they should do. The Athenians would let none of them go, but they themselves called heralds over from the mainland, and after questions had passed two or three times, the last man who crossed over to them from the Lacedaemonians on the mainland brought this message: “The Lacedaemonians tell you to decide for yourselves about yourselves, doing nothing dishonorable.” They consulted among themselves and surrendered their arms and themselves. That day and the following night the Athenians kept them under guard; the next day the Athenians set up a trophy on the island and made everything else ready for the voyage, and distributed the men among the trierarchs to be guarded; and the Lacedaemonians sent a herald and took away their dead. The number killed on the island and taken alive was as follows. In all, 420 hoplites had crossed over; of these, 292 were brought away alive, and the rest had been killed. Of the living, about 120 were Spartiates. Not many Athenians were killed, for it was not a pitched battle.

39 The whole time the men on the island were besieged, from the sea battle to the battle on the island, was seventy-two days. For about twenty of these days, while the envoys were away about the truce, they were given rations; for the rest they lived on what was smuggled in. Some grain was still on the island, and other food was found there; for their commander Epitadas had been giving each man less than the supplies allowed. So the Athenians and the Peloponnesians each withdrew their forces from Pylos and went home; and Cleon’s promise, mad as it was, came true; for within twenty days he brought back the men, as he had undertaken.

40 Of all the events of the war, this was what the Hellenes least expected. They had thought that neither hunger nor any necessity would make Lacedaemonians surrender their arms, but that they would keep them and die fighting as best they could. They could not believe that the men who surrendered were the equals of those who had died; and when one of the Athenian allies, some time later, asked one of the prisoners from the island, to insult him, whether their dead had been brave men, he answered that the spindle (he meant the arrow) would be worth a great deal if it could pick out the brave, meaning that whoever happened to be in the way of the stones and arrows was killed.

41 When the men had been brought to Athens, the Athenians decided to keep them in chains until some agreement was reached, and if before that the Peloponnesians invaded their land, to bring them out and kill them. They set up a garrison at Pylos; and the Messenians from Naupactus, regarding it as their homeland (for Pylos is in what was once Messenian land), sent the most suitable of their men there, who plundered Laconia and did great damage, since they spoke the same dialect. The Lacedaemonians, who had no experience before this of raiding or of warfare of this kind, found it hard to bear, with Helots deserting and with the fear that the unrest in their country might go further. Though they did not want their state of mind known to the Athenians, they sent envoys to them and tried to recover Pylos and the men. But the Athenians reached out for more, and though the envoys came many times, they sent them away with nothing done. Such were the events at Pylos.

42 In the same summer, right after this, the Athenians made an expedition against the territory of Corinth with eighty ships, two thousand of their own hoplites, and two hundred cavalry in horse transports. Allies also went with them, Milesians, Andrians, and Carystians, and the commander was Nicias son of Niceratus, with two colleagues. They sailed and at dawn put in between Chersonesus and Rheitus, at the beach below the Solygean hill. On that hill in ancient times Dorians had established themselves and made war on the Corinthians in the city, who were Aeolians; and there is now a village on it called Solygeia. From this beach where the ships put in, the village is twelve stades away, the city of Corinth sixty, and the Isthmus twenty. The Corinthians had learned in advance from Argos that the Athenian army was coming, and they had long since gone to the Isthmus in force, all except those who lived beyond the Isthmus; and five hundred of them were away on garrison duty in Ambracia and Leucas. The rest, in full force, were watching to see where the Athenians would put in. But when the Athenians sailed in at night without their knowing it and the signals were raised for them, they left half their force at Cenchreae, in case the Athenians should go against Crommyon, and hurried to the rescue.

43 Battus, one of their two generals (there were two present at the battle), took a company and went to the village of Solygeia to guard it, since it had no wall; Lycophron engaged with the rest. First the Corinthians attacked the right wing of the Athenians, which had just landed in front of Chersonesus, and then the rest of the army. The battle was hard and fought hand to hand throughout. The right wing of the Athenians and Carystians (for the Carystians were posted at the end of the line) received the Corinthians and with difficulty pushed them back. The Corinthians fell back to a stone wall (for the ground all sloped upward), threw stones down from above, and raising the paean came on again; the Athenians received them, and the battle was hand to hand once more. Then a company of Corinthians came to the help of their own left wing, routed the Athenian right, and chased it down to the sea; but at the ships the Athenians and Carystians turned back again. The rest of the two armies kept fighting without a break, especially the Corinthian right wing, where Lycophron was, fighting off the Athenian left; for they expected the Athenians to make an attempt on the village of Solygeia.

44 For a long time they held out, neither giving way to the other. Then (for the Athenians had the help of their cavalry, while the other side had no horses) the Corinthians were routed and fell back to the hill, where they grounded their arms and came down no more, but stayed where they were. In this rout on the right wing most of their losses were suffered, and their general Lycophron was killed. The rest of the army, in this way, without being hotly pursued or running in headlong flight, fell back, once it had been forced, and established itself on the high ground. The Athenians, since the enemy no longer came against them to fight, stripped the enemy dead, took up their own, and at once set up a trophy. The other half of the Corinthians, who had been stationed at Cenchreae to watch in case the Athenians sailed against Crommyon, could not see the battle because of Mount Oneium; but when they saw the dust and realized what it meant, they came at once to help. The older men of Corinth also came out from the city when they learned what had happened. When the Athenians saw them all coming on together, they thought it was a relief force from the neighboring Peloponnesians, and they withdrew in haste to their ships, taking the spoils and their own dead except two, whom they left behind because they could not find them. They went aboard and crossed to the islands that lie off the coast, and from there sent a herald and took up under truce the dead they had left behind. Two hundred and twelve Corinthians were killed in the battle, and of the Athenians a little under fifty.

45 The Athenians set out from the islands and sailed the same day to Crommyon, in Corinthian territory, which is 120 stades from the city. They anchored there, laid waste the land, and camped for the night. The next day they sailed along the coast first to the territory of Epidaurus, where they made a landing, and then came to Methana, between Epidaurus and Troezen. They cut off the isthmus of the peninsula with a wall and built a fort there, and from it in the time that followed they plundered the territory of Troezen, Halieis, and Epidaurus. When they had finished the fortifications, they sailed home with the ships.

46 At the same time as these things were happening, Eurymedon and Sophocles, after leaving Pylos for Sicily with the Athenian fleet, arrived at Corcyra and joined the men of the city in an expedition against the Corcyraeans who had established themselves on Mount Istone. These had crossed over after the civil strife, made themselves masters of the countryside, and were doing great harm. The Athenians attacked and took their fort, but the men fled together to a height and came to terms: they would give up their mercenaries, and as for themselves, they would surrender their arms and the Athenian people would decide their fate. The generals took them across under truce to the island of Ptychia to be kept under guard until they could be sent to Athens, on condition that if any one of them was caught trying to escape, the truce would be void for all. The leaders of the Corcyraean popular party, afraid that the Athenians would not put the prisoners to death when they arrived, contrived a scheme of this kind. They persuaded a few of the men on the island by secretly sending friends to them, who were instructed to say, as if out of goodwill, that their best course was to escape as soon as possible, and that they themselves would get a boat ready; for the Athenian generals, they said, were about to hand them over to the Corcyraean people.

47 When they had been persuaded, and were caught sailing out in the boat that had been arranged, the truce was void and all of them were handed over to the Corcyraeans. Not least among those who helped this happen, so that the pretext held good and the men who contrived it acted with less fear, were the Athenian generals, who made it plain that they did not want the men to be taken to Athens by others, and the credit to go to those who brought them, since they themselves were sailing for Sicily. The Corcyraeans took charge of them and shut them up in a large building. Later they brought them out twenty at a time and led them between two lines of hoplites drawn up on either side, tied to one another and struck and stabbed by the men in the lines, whenever any of them saw a personal enemy; and men with whips walked alongside and hurried on those who went too slowly.

48 They brought out some sixty men in this way and killed them before the men in the building noticed (for they thought the others were being moved somewhere else). But when they realized it and someone told them, they called on the Athenians and told them to kill them themselves, if they wished. They refused to come out of the building any longer and said they would not allow anyone to come in, as far as they could prevent it. The Corcyraeans for their part had no intention of forcing the doors. They climbed onto the roof of the building, broke open the ceiling, and threw tiles and shot arrows down on them. The men inside protected themselves as well as they could, and at the same time most of them began to destroy themselves, driving into their throats the arrows that the others shot at them, and hanging themselves with the cords from some beds that happened to be there and with strips torn from their clothes. In every way, for most of the night (for night fell on their sufferings), they did away with themselves or were struck down by those above, and perished. When day came, the Corcyraeans threw them crosswise onto wagons, like mats, and carried them out of the city. All the women who had been captured in the fort they sold into slavery. In this way the Corcyraeans from the mountain were destroyed by the people; and the civil strife, which had been great, ended in this, at least as far as this war was concerned; for nothing worth mentioning was left of the other side. The Athenians sailed away to Sicily, where they had been bound from the start, and carried on the war with their allies there.

49 At the end of the summer the Athenians at Naupactus and the Acarnanians made an expedition against Anactorium, a Corinthian city at the mouth of the Ambracian Gulf, and took it by betrayal. The Acarnanians expelled the inhabitants and occupied the place themselves with settlers drawn from all their communities. And the summer ended.

50 The following winter Aristides son of Archippus, one of the commanders of the Athenian ships sent out to the allies to collect money, arrested at Eion on the Strymon Artaphernes, a Persian, who was on his way from the King to Lacedaemon. He was brought to Athens, and the Athenians had his letters transcribed from the Assyrian script and read them. Among many other things written there, the main point addressed to the Lacedaemonians was that the King did not know what they wanted; for many envoys had come, and no two said the same thing. If, then, they had anything clear to say, they should send men to him with the Persian. Later the Athenians sent Artaphernes in a trireme to Ephesus, and envoys with him; but these learned there that King Artaxerxes son of Xerxes had recently died (for he died at about this time)⁴, and returned home.

51 In the same winter the Chians pulled down their new wall at the order of the Athenians, who suspected that they were planning a revolt against them; but they first obtained from the Athenians pledges and such assurance as they could that no harsh measures would be taken against them. So the winter ended, and with it the seventh year of this war, which Thucydides recorded.

52 At the very beginning of the following summer there was a partial eclipse of the sun at the new moon, and early in the same month an earthquake. The exiles from Mytilene and the rest of Lesbos, setting out most of them from the mainland, hired mercenaries from the Peloponnese, gathered others on the spot, and took Rhoeteum; they received two thousand Phocaean staters and gave it back, having done it no harm. After this they marched against Antandrus and took the city by betrayal. Their plan was to free the other cities called the Actaean cities, which the Mytilenians had formerly occupied and the Athenians now held, and Antandrus above all. Once they had made it strong (for it was easy to build ships there, since timber was on the spot and Mount Ida close above it, and the rest of the equipment as well), they would easily use it as a base to harass Lesbos, which was near, and to bring under their control the Aeolian towns on the mainland. That was what they were preparing to do.

53 In the same summer the Athenians made an expedition against Cythera with sixty ships, two thousand hoplites, a few cavalry, and some of their allies, Milesians and others. Their generals were Nicias son of Niceratus, Nicostratus son of Diitrephes, and Autocles son of Tolmaeus. Cythera is an island lying off Laconia, opposite Malea. Its inhabitants are Lacedaemonians of the Perioeci, and an official called the judge of Cythera crossed over from Sparta every year; the Lacedaemonians also kept sending a garrison of hoplites there and took great care of the island. For it was a landing place for the merchant ships from Egypt and Libya, and at the same time it made pirates less troublesome to Laconia from the sea, which was the only side from which it could be harmed; for the whole country juts out into the Sicilian and Cretan seas.

54 The Athenians put in with their force. With ten ships and two thousand Milesian hoplites they took the city on the sea called Scandea, and with the rest of the army they landed on the side of the island facing Malea and advanced against the city of the Cytherians; and they found at once that all the inhabitants had encamped in the field. A battle was fought, and the Cytherians held out for a short time; then they were routed and fled to the upper city, and later came to terms with Nicias and his colleagues, surrendering themselves to the Athenians’ discretion, except that their lives were to be spared. Nicias had already had some talks with certain of the Cytherians, and so the terms of the agreement were settled more quickly and more favorably for them, both for the moment and for the future; otherwise the Athenians would have removed the Cytherians, since they were Lacedaemonians and the island lay so close off Laconia. After the agreement the Athenians took over Scandea, the town by the harbor, put a garrison in Cythera, and sailed to Asine, Helos, and most of the places along the coast. Making landings and camping at whatever points seemed opportune, they laid waste the land for about seven days.

55 When the Lacedaemonians saw the Athenians holding Cythera and expected them to make landings of the same kind on their own land, they nowhere opposed them with their full force concentrated, but sent garrisons around the country, a number of hoplites wherever they were needed, and in other respects kept a close watch. They were afraid that there might be some revolution against their established order. The disaster on the island had been great and unexpected, Pylos and Cythera were held, and on every side a war was closing round them, quick and impossible to guard against. So, contrary to their custom, they raised a force of four hundred cavalry, and archers as well, and in military matters they became more hesitant than ever before. They found themselves engaged, contrary to the established character of their own preparations, in a naval contest, and that against Athenians, for whom anything left unattempted was always so much lost from what they reckoned to achieve. At the same time the many strokes of fortune that had befallen them in a short time, against all calculation, filled them with the greatest dismay, and they were afraid that some disaster like the one on the island might again overtake them. For this reason they were less daring in battle; and whatever move they made, they thought they would go wrong, because their confidence had become unsure, from their former inexperience of misfortune.

56 So while the Athenians were laying waste the coast, for the most part they kept quiet, whenever a landing was made near one of their garrisons, each garrison thinking itself too few in numbers in a situation of this kind. One garrison, however, which did fight back, near Cotyrta and Aphroditia, charged and scattered the crowd of light-armed troops, who were spread out, but fell back again when the hoplites received them. A few of its men were killed and some arms were taken, and the Athenians set up a trophy and sailed back to Cythera. From there they sailed around to Epidaurus Limera, laid waste part of the land, and came to Thyrea, which is in the district called Cynuria, on the border of the Argolid and Laconia. The Lacedaemonians, who possessed it, had given it to the Aeginetans to live in after they were expelled from Aegina, because of the services the Aeginetans had done them at the time of the earthquake and the revolt of the Helots, and because, though subjects of the Athenians, they had always sided with the Lacedaemonians in their policy.

57 While the Athenians were still sailing up, the Aeginetans abandoned the wall by the sea that they happened to be building and withdrew to the upper city where they lived, about ten stades from the sea. One of the Lacedaemonian garrisons in the district, which had been helping them build the wall, refused to go into the walls with them, though the Aeginetans begged them to; it seemed dangerous to them to be shut up inside the wall. They withdrew to the high ground and, since they did not think themselves a match for the enemy, kept quiet. Meanwhile the Athenians put in, advanced at once with their whole army, and took Thyrea. They burned the city and plundered what was in it, and they brought back to Athens all the Aeginetans who had not been killed in the fighting, along with the Lacedaemonian commander who was with them, Tantalus son of Patrocles; he had been taken alive, wounded. They also brought a few men from Cythera whom they thought it safer to remove. The Athenians decided to settle these men on the islands; that the other Cytherians should keep their own land and pay a tribute of four talents; that all the Aeginetans who had been captured should be put to death, because of the old and constant enmity between them; and that Tantalus should be put in chains with the other Lacedaemonians from the island.

58 In the same summer, in Sicily, an armistice was made first between the Camarinaeans and the Geloans. Then the other Sicilian Greeks also met at Gela, with envoys from all the cities, and entered into talks with one another to see whether they could be reconciled. Many opinions were expressed on both sides, as they disputed and made claims, each according to where they thought they were being put at a disadvantage; and Hermocrates son of Hermon, a Syracusan, who did most to persuade them, spoke to the assembly as follows.

59 “Sicilians, I shall speak not as a citizen of the least of cities, nor of the one that suffers most from the war, but to set before you all the opinion that seems to me best for Sicily as a whole. As to war, why should anyone go through all its evils at length to men who know them? No one is driven into it by ignorance, and no one who thinks he will gain something by it is turned back by fear. What happens is that to one side the profits look greater than the dangers, while the other is willing to face the risks rather than accept an immediate loss. And if it happens that both sides are pursuing these aims at the wrong moment, advice to come to terms is useful. And that is what would be worth most to us now, if we would listen. For it was in planning well, as we thought, to secure each his own interests that we went to war in the first place, and it is for the same reason that we are now trying, by debating with one another, to be reconciled; and if it turns out that each cannot leave with his fair share, we shall go to war again.

60 “Yet we must recognize that this conference, if we are wise, will concern not only our separate interests but whether we can still save Sicily as a whole, which, in my judgment, is the object of Athenian designs. And we must regard the Athenians as far more compelling peacemakers on this point than any words of mine. They have the greatest power of all the Hellenes; they are here with a few ships, watching for our mistakes; and under the lawful name of alliance they are plausibly turning to their own advantage the hostility that is natural to them. If we go to war and call them in, men who march even against those who do not call them in, if we do ourselves harm at our own expense and at the same time pave the way for their empire, then it is likely that when they see we are worn out, they will one day come with a larger expedition and try to bring all of this under their control.

61 “Yet if we are wise, each of us should call in allies and take on risks in order to gain what does not belong to us, rather than to damage what we already have; and we should recognize that civil strife is the greatest ruin of cities, and of Sicily, whose inhabitants are all the targets of a plot together while we are divided city against city. Knowing this, we should be reconciled, citizen with citizen and city with city, and try together to save the whole of Sicily. Let no one suppose that the Dorians among us are enemies of the Athenians while the Chalcidians are safe because of their Ionian kinship. The Athenians do not attack because the peoples are divided by nature, out of hatred for one of them, but because they covet the good things of Sicily, which we hold in common. They have shown this now in the appeal of the Chalcidian people: to men who had never once come to their aid under the alliance, they eagerly gave more than they were owed under the treaty. That the Athenians should be grasping for more and should plan accordingly is very forgivable. I do not blame those who want to rule, but those who are readier to submit; for it is human nature always to rule what yields and to guard against what attacks. But those of us who know all this and do not look ahead properly, or anyone who has come here without judging that the first thing of all is for everyone to deal well with the common danger, are making a mistake. We would be rid of it quickest if we came to terms with one another; for the Athenians do not set out from their own country but from that of those who call them in. In this way war is not ended by war, but our differences are ended by peace without trouble, and those who were called in, having come plausibly to do injustice, will go away with good reason and with nothing done.

62 “So much good is found, where the Athenians are concerned, by those who decide well. As for peace, which all agree is the best thing, why should we not make it among ourselves as well? Or do you think that if one man has something good and another the reverse, it is not peace rather than war that would end the troubles of the one and preserve the advantages of the other? And that peace does not hold honors and glories with less risk, and all the other things that one might go through at length, as one could about war? Considering this, you should not disregard my words, but each of you should rather see in them, in good time, his own safety. And if anyone thinks he will surely gain some end, whether by justice or by force, let him not be painfully deceived by the failure of his hopes. Let him know that many before now have pursued with vengeance those who wronged them, and others have hoped to gain more by some power they had; and the first not only failed to avenge themselves but did not even survive, while the second, instead of gaining more, ended by losing what they had besides. For vengeance does not succeed by right merely because a wrong was done, nor is strength secure because it is full of hope. It is the incalculable future that prevails for the most part; it is the most treacherous thing of all, and yet it is also plainly the most useful; for when we are equally afraid, we think twice before attacking one another.

63 “So now, alarmed on both counts, by the dread of this uncertain future that no one can foresee and by the presence of the Athenians, already formidable among us,⁵ and judging that our failure to achieve what each of us thought he would has been sufficiently explained by these obstacles, let us send away from our country the enemies who stand over it. Let us ourselves make an everlasting peace, if possible; if not, let us make a truce for as long as we can and put off our private quarrels to another time. In short, let us recognize that if we listen to me, each of us will have a free city, and from it, as our own masters, we will repay with equal courage whoever treats us well or ill. But if we refuse and obey others, the question will no longer be one of punishing anyone; even if we were very fortunate, we would become, of necessity, friends of our worst enemies and enemies of those with whom we ought not to quarrel.

64 “For my part, as I said at the beginning, though I represent the greatest city and am more likely to attack than to need to defend myself, I think it right to foresee these things and make concessions; not to harm my enemies in such a way that I suffer more harm myself, nor, out of foolish contentiousness, to think that I am as much master of fortune, which I do not control, as of my own judgment, but to give way as far as is reasonable. And I ask the rest of you to do as I do, and to give way at one another’s hands rather than the enemy’s. There is no shame in kinsmen giving way to kinsmen, a Dorian to a Dorian or a Chalcidian to those of his own stock; we are, in a word, neighbors, living together in one land, an island, and called by one name, Sicilians. We will go to war, I suppose, when it happens, and we will make peace again among ourselves through talks held in common; but if we are wise, we will always unite to repel foreign invaders, since when any one of us is harmed, all of us are in danger; and we will never in future call in allies or peacemakers. By doing this, we shall not deprive Sicily of two good things at present, being rid of the Athenians and of a war at home, and for the future we shall keep it free by ourselves and less exposed to the designs of others.”

65 When Hermocrates had spoken in this way, the Sicilians were persuaded and came to an agreement among themselves that they would end the war, each keeping what they held, except that Morgantina was to go to the Camarinaeans on payment of a fixed sum of money to the Syracusans. The allies of the Athenians called in the Athenian commanders and told them that they were going to come to terms and that the treaty would include the Athenians as well. The Athenians approved, and they made the agreement; and after this the Athenian ships sailed away from Sicily. When the generals came home, the Athenians in the city punished two of them, Pythodorus and Sophocles, with exile, and fined the third, Eurymedon, on the charge that when they could have subdued Sicily they had been bribed to withdraw. So, with the good fortune they were then enjoying, they expected that nothing should stand in their way, and that they could accomplish the possible and the more difficult alike, with a large force or a weaker one. The reason was their unexpected success in most things, which lent strength to their hopes.

66 In the same summer the Megarians in the city were hard pressed both by the Athenians in the war, since they invaded the land in full force twice every year, and by their own exiles at Pegae, who had been expelled by the popular party in a civil conflict and were doing them harm by raiding. They began to say to one another that they ought to take the exiles back and not let the city be ruined from both sides. The friends of the exiles, aware of the talk, also began to press for this proposal, more openly than before. The leaders of the popular party saw that the people, worn down by their troubles, would not be able to hold out with them. They were afraid, and opened talks with the Athenian generals, Hippocrates son of Ariphron and Demosthenes son of Alcisthenes, wanting to betray the city to them and thinking this less dangerous for themselves than the return of the men they had driven out. They agreed that first the Athenians would take the Long Walls (these ran for about eight stades from the city to Nisaea, their port), so that the Peloponnesians could not come to help from Nisaea, where they alone made up the garrison to keep Megara secure; and that after this the Megarians would try to betray the upper city as well. Once that was done, they expected, the city would come over more easily.

67 So the Athenians, when everything had been prepared on both sides, in deed and in word, sailed at nightfall to Minoa, the island belonging to Megara, with six hundred hoplites under the command of Hippocrates, and took up a position in a pit from which bricks had been dug for the walls, not far off. The force with the other general, Demosthenes, Plataean light-armed troops and some frontier guards, lay in ambush at the shrine of Enyalius, which is closer still. No one knew of it that night except the men whose business it was to know. As dawn was about to break, the Megarian traitors did the following. For a long time they had been securing the opening of the gates in this way: with the commander’s consent, they used to carry a sculling boat on a wagon by night through the ditch down to the sea, as if they were raiders, and sail out; and before daylight they would bring it back on the wagon and take it into the walls through the gates, so that, as they said, the Athenians on Minoa would have no idea of their patrols, since no boat would be visible in the harbor. This time the wagon was already at the gates, and when they were opened as usual for the boat, the Athenians, who saw it (for this was done by prearranged signal), ran at full speed out of the ambush, wanting to get there before the gates were shut again and while the wagon was still in them, keeping them from being closed; and at the same moment the Megarians who were acting with them killed the guards at the gates. First Demosthenes’ men, the Plataeans and frontier guards, ran in where the trophy now stands; and just inside the gates (for the nearest Peloponnesians had noticed) the Plataeans fought those who came to help, beat them, and held the gates secure for the Athenian hoplites as they came on.

68 Then the Athenians, each man as he got inside, went on toward the wall. The Peloponnesian garrison at first held out and defended themselves, few as they were, and some of them were killed; but most of them took to flight, frightened by an enemy falling on them at night and by the Megarian traitors fighting against them, and thinking that the Megarians as a whole had betrayed them. For it happened besides that the Athenian herald, on his own judgment, proclaimed that any Megarian who wished might come and take his stand under arms with the Athenians. When the garrison heard this they waited no longer, but, believing now that they really were being fought by both together, fled to Nisaea. At dawn, with the walls already taken and the Megarians in the city in an uproar, those who had dealt with the Athenians, and with them another crowd that was in the secret, said that the gates must be opened and the army must go out to battle. It had been agreed among them that when the gates were opened the Athenians would burst in, while they themselves would be easy to tell apart (they were to anoint themselves with oil), so that they would not be harmed. They felt all the safer about opening the gates because the four thousand Athenian hoplites from Eleusis and the six hundred horsemen, marching through the night as agreed, had arrived. But when they had anointed themselves and were already at the gates, someone who was in the secret disclosed the plot to the other side. These banded together and came in a body, and said that they must neither go out (for they had never before dared to do so even when they were stronger) nor lead the city into open danger; and if anyone did not obey, the battle would be fought right there. They gave no sign that they knew what was going on, but insisted as men giving the best advice, and at the same time stayed by the gates and guarded them, so that the plotters could not do what they had intended.

69 The Athenian generals saw that some obstacle had arisen and that they would not be able to take the city by force, and at once began to wall in Nisaea, thinking that if they took it before anyone came to its aid, Megara too would come over the sooner (iron arrived quickly from Athens, and stonemasons, and everything else that was needed). Starting from the wall they held, they built a cross wall on the side facing Megara, and from it the army, dividing the work, carried a ditch and walls down to the sea on both sides of Nisaea, using stones and bricks from the suburb; they also cut down trees and timber and put up a stockade wherever one was needed; and the houses of the suburb, once battlements were added, themselves served as a fortification. They worked all that day; and on the next, toward evening, the wall was all but finished. Then the men in Nisaea took fright. They were short of food (they used to get it day by day from the upper city); they did not think the Peloponnesians would come quickly to their aid; and they regarded the Megarians as enemies. So they came to terms with the Athenians: each man was to be released for a fixed ransom in silver after giving up his arms, and the Athenians were to deal as they pleased with the Lacedaemonians, both the commander and any other who was inside. On these terms they agreed and came out; and the Athenians broke the Long Walls away from the city of Megara, took over Nisaea, and set about their other preparations.

70 At this time Brasidas son of Tellis, a Lacedaemonian, happened to be in the neighborhood of Sicyon and Corinth, preparing an expedition to the Thracian region. When he learned of the capture of the walls, he was afraid both for the Peloponnesians in Nisaea and that Megara would be taken. He sent to the Boeotians, telling them to meet him quickly with an army at Tripodiscus (this is a village of the Megarid by that name, below Mount Geraneia), and he himself came with 2,700 Corinthian hoplites, four hundred Phliasians, six hundred Sicyonians, and those of his own men who had already been mustered, thinking that he would still find Nisaea uncaptured. When he learned the truth (for he happened to have set out for Tripodiscus by night), he picked three hundred men from the army and, before word of his coming could get out, approached the city of Megara without being seen by the Athenians, who were down by the sea. His aim, as he gave it out, was to make an attempt on Nisaea, and in fact, if he could, to make one; but above all he wanted to get into the city of Megara and secure it. He asked them to admit his men, saying that he had hopes of recovering Nisaea.

71 But the factions of the Megarians were afraid: the one that he would bring in the exiles and drive them out; the other that the people, fearing just this, would attack them, and that the city, fighting within itself with the Athenians lying in wait close by, would be destroyed. So they did not admit him, and both sides thought it best to keep quiet and watch what would happen. For each of them expected that there would be a battle between the Athenians and the relieving force, and that it was safer for them to go over to whichever side they favored after that side had won. Brasidas, when he could not persuade them, went back to the rest of his army.

72 At dawn the Boeotians arrived. Even before Brasidas sent, they had intended to come to the aid of Megara, since they did not regard the danger as someone else’s, and they were already at Plataea in full force. When the messenger came as well, they were all the more encouraged; they sent on 2,200 hoplites and six hundred horsemen, and went back home with the larger part. With the whole army now present, not less than six thousand hoplites, and with the Athenian hoplites drawn up around Nisaea and by the sea and their light-armed troops scattered over the plain, the Boeotian horsemen fell on the light-armed troops unexpectedly and drove them toward the sea (for until then no help had yet come to the Megarians from anywhere). The Athenian horsemen rode out against them in turn and came to close quarters, and a cavalry battle went on for a long time, in which each side claims to have had no worse of it. The Athenians killed the Boeotian cavalry commander and a few others who had ridden right up to Nisaea, and stripped them; and having taken possession of these bodies they gave them back under a truce and set up a trophy. In the action as a whole, however, neither side came away with a decisive result when they separated, the Boeotians going back to their own army and the Athenians to Nisaea.

73 After this Brasidas and his army moved nearer to the sea and to the city of Megara, and taking up a favorable position they drew up in line and waited. They thought that the Athenians would attack them, and they knew that the Megarians were watching to see which side would win. They considered that their position was good on both counts. In the first place, they were not attacking first or willingly starting a battle and a risk; since they had shown openly that they were ready to defend themselves, the victory could fairly be awarded to them almost without a fight. At the same time it worked out rightly for them with regard to the Megarians as well. For if they had not been seen to come, nothing would have been left to chance: they would plainly have lost the city at once, as if they had been beaten. As it was, the Athenians too might well choose not to fight, so that they would gain what they had come for without a battle. And this is just what happened. The Megarians waited, and the Athenians came out and drew up beside the Long Walls but themselves kept quiet when no attack was made on them. Their generals, too, reckoned that the risk was not an even one for them. Most things had already gone their way; if they began a battle against a larger force, they would either take Megara by winning or, if they failed, lose the best of their hoplites; whereas on the other side each of the contingents present was risking only a part of its whole force, and so would naturally be willing to dare. After waiting some time, when nothing was attempted by either side, the Athenians withdrew first to Nisaea, and then the Peloponnesians to the place from which they had set out. So at last the Megarians who were friends of the exiles took heart, on the ground that Brasidas had prevailed and the Athenians had no longer been willing to fight. They opened the gates to Brasidas himself and to the commanders from the cities, received them, and entered into talks with them, while the party that had dealt with the Athenians was already thoroughly cowed.

74 Later, when the allies had dispersed to their cities, Brasidas himself went back to Corinth and prepared his expedition to the Thracian region, which had been his purpose from the first. As for the Megarians in the city, once the Athenians too had gone home, those who had taken the largest part in the dealings with the Athenians, knowing that they had been found out, at once slipped away; the rest, after consulting with the friends of the exiles, brought back the exiles from Pegae, having bound them by solemn oaths to bear no grudge for the past and to give the city the best counsel. But once these men were in office, they held a review of arms, separated the companies, and picked out about a hundred men from among their enemies and those who seemed to have had the largest share in the dealings with the Athenians. They forced the people to vote on these men openly, and when they were condemned, put them to death; and they brought the city as near to a complete oligarchy as could be. And this change of government, made by a very few as the result of civil strife, lasted for a very long time.

75 In the same summer, when the Mytilenians were about to fortify Antandrus, as they intended, the generals of the Athenian ships that collected money, Demodocus and Aristides, were in the Hellespont (their third colleague, Lamachus, had sailed into the Pontus with ten ships). They learned of the preparations at the place, and it seemed a serious danger to them that it might become like Anaea opposite Samos, where the Samian exiles had established themselves and were helping the Peloponnesians by sending them helmsmen for their fleets, throwing the Samians in the city into turmoil, and taking in those who left it. So they gathered an army from the allies and sailed there, defeated in battle the men who came out from Antandrus against them, and recovered the place. Not long after, Lamachus, who had sailed into the Pontus, anchored in the river Cales in the territory of Heraclea and lost his ships, when rain fell inland and the flood came down suddenly. He himself and his army went by land through the Bithynian Thracians, who live across the water in Asia, and reached Chalcedon, the Megarian colony at the mouth of the Pontus.

76 In the same summer Demosthenes, an Athenian general, also arrived at Naupactus with forty ships, immediately after the withdrawal from the Megarid. For certain men in the Boeotian cities were negotiating with him and Hippocrates about affairs in Boeotia, wishing to change the constitution and turn it into a democracy like that of the Athenians; and it was chiefly at the instigation of Ptoeodorus, an exile from Thebes, that the following plan was prepared for them. Some were to betray Siphae (Siphae is in the territory of Thespiae, on the sea, on the Crisaean Gulf). Chaeronea, which is a dependency of Orchomenus, formerly called Minyan Orchomenus and now Boeotian, was to be handed over by others from Orchomenus; and the Orchomenian exiles were taking the most active part in the plot and were hiring men from the Peloponnese (Chaeronea is the last place in Boeotia toward Phanoteus in Phocis), and some of the Phocians were also involved. The Athenians were to seize Delium, the sanctuary of Apollo in the territory of Tanagra, facing Euboea; and all this was to happen at the same time on a fixed day, so that the Boeotians would not come in a body to the relief of Delium but each would be held at home by trouble in his own district. If the attempt succeeded and Delium was fortified, they expected that, even if there were no immediate revolution in the governments of the Boeotians, with these places held, the land plundered, and a refuge close at hand for each district, matters would not stay where they were; in time, with the Athenians supporting those who had revolted and the Boeotians not having their forces united, they would settle things to their advantage.

77 Such was the plot being prepared. Hippocrates himself, with a force from the city, was to march into Boeotia when the moment came, and he sent Demosthenes ahead with the forty ships to Naupactus, so that he might collect an army from that region, of Acarnanians and the other allies, and sail against Siphae, which was to be betrayed. A day had been named to them on which they were to do these things together. Demosthenes, on his arrival, found that Oeniadae had been forced by all the Acarnanians into the Athenian alliance; he himself raised all the allied forces in that quarter, marched first against Salynthius and the Agraeans and won them over, and then made his other preparations so as to be at Siphae when he was needed.

78 About the same time in the summer, Brasidas was on his march to the Thracian region with 1,700 hoplites. When he reached Heraclea in Trachis, he sent a messenger ahead to his friends at Pharsalus, asking them to conduct him and his army through; and Panaerus, Dorus, Hippolochidas, Torylaus, and Strophacus, who was proxenus of the Chalcidians (the citizen who looked after their interests in his own city), came to meet him at Melitia in Achaea. Then he set out. Other Thessalians also escorted him, and from Larisa Niconidas, a friend of Perdiccas. For Thessaly was not easy to cross without an escort in any case, and certainly not under arms; and among all the Hellenes alike it was regarded as suspect to cross a neighbor’s land without its consent. Besides, the mass of the Thessalian people had always been well disposed to the Athenians. So if the Thessalians had not been governed in their native fashion by a narrow ruling group rather than under equal laws, he would never have got through; for even then, as he was on his march, others of the opposite party met him at the river Enipeus and tried to stop him, saying that he was doing wrong in going on without the consent of the whole nation. His escort said that they would not take him through against their will, but that he had come unexpectedly and they, as his hosts, were conducting him. Brasidas himself also said that he came as a friend to the land of the Thessalians and to themselves, that he was bearing arms against the Athenians, who were his enemies, and not against them; that he knew of no enmity between the Thessalians and the Lacedaemonians that would keep them from using each other’s land; that he would not go on now against their will (nor could he), but that he did not think he ought to be stopped. Hearing this, they went away; and he, on the advice of his escort, went on at a run without stopping, before a larger force could gather to prevent him. On that day, the day he set out from Melitia, he got as far as Pharsalus and camped on the river Apidanus; from there he went to Phacium, and from there into Perrhaebia. At this point his Thessalian escort turned back, and the Perrhaebians, who are subjects of the Thessalians, brought him to Dium in the dominion of Perdiccas, a town of Macedonia that lies below Olympus, facing Thessaly.

79 In this way Brasidas ran through Thessaly before anyone could get ready to stop him, and reached Perdiccas and Chalcidice. For when things went well for the Athenians, the peoples in the Thracian region who had revolted from Athens and Perdiccas had taken fright and brought the army out of the Peloponnese. The Chalcidians thought that the Athenians would attack them first (and at the same time the neighboring cities that had not revolted were secretly joining in inviting the army). Perdiccas was not an open enemy, but he too was afraid of the old differences with the Athenians, and above all he wanted to bring Arrhabaeus, the king of the Lyncestians, to submission. And it helped them to bring an army out of the Peloponnese more easily that the Lacedaemonians were faring badly at the time.

80 For since the Athenians were pressing hard on the Peloponnese, and not least on their own land, the Lacedaemonians hoped that the best way to divert them was to harass them in return by sending an army against their allies, especially as the allies were ready to maintain it and were calling them in to help them revolt. At the same time they were glad to have a pretext to send out some of the Helots, for fear that with Pylos in enemy hands they might attempt some revolt. For they had once done the following as well, out of fear of the Helots’ obstinacy and their numbers (for with the Lacedaemonians most institutions had always been arranged chiefly with a view to guarding against the Helots). They proclaimed that those of the Helots who claimed to have done them the best service in their wars should be picked out, on the understanding that they would be freed. This was a test: they thought that those who, out of high spirit, claimed each to be the first to be freed would also be the most likely to attack them. About two thousand were selected; they put on garlands and went around the temples as men set free; but not long afterward the Lacedaemonians made away with them, and no one knew in what way each of them was destroyed. So now they gladly sent seven hundred of them as hoplites with Brasidas; the rest he brought from the Peloponnese, hired with pay.

81 The Lacedaemonians sent Brasidas himself, chiefly at his own wish (though the Chalcidians too were eager for it). At Sparta he was thought to be a man of energy in everything, and after he went abroad he proved of the greatest value to the Lacedaemonians. For in the immediate situation, by showing himself just and moderate toward the cities, he brought most of them to revolt, and some of the places he took by betrayal; so that when the Lacedaemonians wished to come to terms, as they did, they had places to give back in exchange for places, and a respite from the war for the Peloponnese. And in the war that came later, after the events in Sicily, it was the excellence and intelligence Brasidas showed at that time, known to some by experience and believed by others from report, that did most to give the allies of the Athenians a desire for the Lacedaemonians. For he was the first to go out, and since he was thought to be a good man in every respect, he left behind him a firm hope that the others too were of the same kind.

82 At that time, then, when he had arrived in the Thracian region, the Athenians, learning of it, declared Perdiccas an enemy, holding him responsible for the expedition’s passage, and set a stronger guard over their allies in that quarter.

83 Perdiccas at once took Brasidas and his army, together with his own forces, and marched against his neighbor Arrhabaeus son of Bromerus, king of the Lyncestian Macedonians, with whom he had a quarrel and whom he wished to subdue. But when he and Brasidas with the army reached the pass into Lyncus, Brasidas said that before going to war he wished first to go and try by argument to make Arrhabaeus an ally of the Lacedaemonians, if he could. For Arrhabaeus had in fact been sending heralds, ready to submit the matter to Brasidas as arbitrator; and the Chalcidian envoys who were with him advised him not to remove Perdiccas’ dangers for him, so that they would find him all the more eager to serve their own interests. At the same time Perdiccas’ envoys at Lacedaemon had said something to the effect that he would make many of the places around him allies of theirs, so that on that ground Brasidas thought he had a right to deal with the affair of Arrhabaeus in the common interest. Perdiccas said that he had not brought Brasidas to be a judge of their quarrels but rather to destroy whatever enemies he himself pointed out to him, and that Brasidas would be doing wrong if he held talks with Arrhabaeus while he, Perdiccas, was feeding half the army. Brasidas met with Arrhabaeus against Perdiccas’ will and in open disagreement with him, was persuaded by what he said, and led the army away before it invaded the country. After this Perdiccas paid a third of the army’s upkeep instead of half, thinking himself wronged.

84 In the same summer, immediately afterward, Brasidas, with the Chalcidians as well, marched against Acanthus, the colony of the Andrians, a little before the vintage. The Acanthians were divided among themselves over whether to admit him, those who were joining the Chalcidians in inviting him against the people. Nevertheless, out of fear for their crop, which was still out in the fields, the mass of them were persuaded by Brasidas to admit him alone and to hear him before deciding, and they admitted him. He stood before the people (and he was not, for a Lacedaemonian, an incapable speaker) and spoke as follows.

85 “Men of Acanthus, the Lacedaemonians have sent me and my army out to make good the reason we gave at the beginning of the war, when we declared that we would fight the Athenians to free Hellas. If we have come late, because we were disappointed in our expectations of the war over there, by which we hoped to destroy the Athenians quickly by ourselves without any risk to you, let no one blame us; for now that the chance has come, we are here, and with you we will try to bring them down. But I am surprised that you have shut your gates against me, and that my coming is not welcome to you. We Lacedaemonians thought that we were coming to allies, who even before we arrived in fact would be with us at least in spirit and would want us; and with that in mind we took this great risk, making a march of many days through foreign territory and showing every possible zeal. If you have something else in mind, or mean to stand in the way of your own freedom and that of the other Hellenes, it would be a terrible thing. It is not only that you yourselves are resisting; whoever else I approach will be less willing to come over to me, since they will take it hard that you, the first I came to, with a city of consequence to offer and a reputation for good sense, did not receive me. And I will have no believable reason to show for it, but will seem either to be offering a freedom that is unjust or to have come too weak and powerless to protect you against the Athenians if they attack. Yet when I came to the relief of Nisaea with the very army I have now, the Athenians, though more numerous, were not willing to engage it; so it is not likely that they will send against you, by sea, a force equal to the army they had at Nisaea.

86 “I myself have come here not for harm but for the liberation of the Hellenes, having bound the authorities at Lacedaemon by the most solemn oaths that those whom I win over shall truly be allies and independent. And we have not come to have you as allies by winning you over through force or deceit, but, on the contrary, to fight as your allies, since you are enslaved by the Athenians. I do not think, then, that I should be suspected, when I am giving the strongest pledges, or be thought a protector without power; and I ask you to come over to us with confidence. And if anyone is holding back because he privately fears some man, fearing that I might put the city into the hands of certain men, let him trust me most of all. For I have not come to take part in faction, and I do not think that I would be bringing you real freedom if I disregarded your ancestral constitution and enslaved the many to the few or the few to the many. That would be harsher than the rule of a foreigner; and we Lacedaemonians would win, not gratitude for our pains, but blame instead of honor and glory; and the charges on which we are making war on the Athenians we would be seen to deserve ourselves, and more hatefully than the man who never made a show of virtue. For men of standing it is more shameful to get the better of others by specious deceit than by open force: the one attacks with the claim of right that strength, given by fortune, confers; the other by the scheming of an unjust mind.

87 “So great is the care we take in matters of the greatest importance to us, and you could get no better assurance, beyond the oaths, than from men whose deeds, when weighed against their words, give you the necessary conviction that their interest lies exactly where they have said. If, when I offer this, you say that you cannot accept it, and claim, as men who are well disposed, that you should be allowed to decline without suffering for it; if you say that freedom does not seem to you to be without danger, and that it is right to bring it to those who can receive it but to force it on no one against his will, then I will call the gods and heroes of your country to witness that I came for your good and could not persuade you, and I will try to compel you by ravaging your land. I will no longer think that I am doing wrong; I will have reason on my side, and two necessities. The Lacedaemonians must not, through your good will toward us, be harmed by the money you pay to the Athenians if you are not brought over; and the Hellenes must not be prevented by you from escaping slavery. Otherwise we would not be justified in acting so; nor are we Lacedaemonians obliged to free those who are unwilling, except for the sake of some common good. Nor again are we seeking empire; we are eager rather to stop others from holding it, and we would wrong the greater number if, when we are bringing independence to all, we allowed you to oppose us. Consider all this well. Strive to be the first to begin freedom for the Hellenes and to lay up glory forever; to keep your own property from harm; and to give your whole city the fairest of names.”

88 That was what Brasidas said. The Acanthians, after much had been said on both sides, voted in secret, and the majority, because of Brasidas’ persuasive words and from fear for their crop, decided to revolt from the Athenians. They made him pledge his good faith by the oaths that the Lacedaemonian authorities had sworn when they sent him out, that those whom he won over should truly be allies and independent; and on those terms they received the army. Not long afterward Stagirus, also a colony of the Andrians, joined in the revolt. These, then, were the events of this summer.

89 At the very beginning of the following winter, the plan in Boeotia was being carried through for Hippocrates and Demosthenes, the Athenian generals: Demosthenes was to be at Siphae with the ships, and Hippocrates at Delium. But a mistake was made in the days on which both were to march. Demosthenes sailed to Siphae too early, with Acarnanians and many of the allies from that quarter on board, and accomplished nothing, because the plot had been revealed by Nicomachus, a Phocian from Phanoteus, who told the Lacedaemonians, and they the Boeotians. The whole of Boeotia came to the rescue (for Hippocrates was not yet in the country to distract them), and Siphae and Chaeronea were occupied in advance. When the plotters learned of the mistake, they made no move in the cities.

90 Hippocrates called out the Athenians in full levy, the citizens themselves, the resident aliens, and all the foreigners who were in the city, and arrived at Delium after the event, when the Boeotians had already withdrawn from Siphae. He encamped his army and fortified Delium in the following way. They dug a ditch all around the sanctuary and the temple, and threw up the earth from the trench to serve as a wall; along it they drove in stakes and threw in the vines they cut from around the sanctuary, together with stones and bricks they pulled down from the houses nearby, and they raised the fortification by every means. They also set up wooden towers where they were needed and where there was no building belonging to the sanctuary; for the colonnade that had stood there had fallen down. They began work on the third day after setting out from home, and worked on that day and the fourth and on the fifth until the midday meal. Then, when most of it was finished, the army withdrew first from Delium about ten stades, as if marching home; most of the light-armed troops went on at once, while the hoplites grounded their arms and halted. Hippocrates, staying behind, was still posting guards and arranging for the completion of what remained of the outworks.

91 During these days the Boeotians were gathering at Tanagra. When the men from all the cities had arrived and they learned that the Athenians were moving off homeward, the other Boeotarchs (the Boeotian federal commanders, of whom there are eleven) did not approve of fighting, since the enemy were no longer in Boeotia (for the Athenians were just about on the borders of the territory of Oropus when they grounded their arms). But Pagondas son of Aeoladas, one of the two Boeotarchs from Thebes, the other being Arianthidas son of Lysimachidas, held the command; he wished to fight and thought it better to take the risk. Calling up the men company by company, so that they would not all leave their posts at once, he urged the Boeotians to march against the Athenians and give battle, speaking as follows.

92 “Men of Boeotia, it ought never to have occurred to any of us commanders that it would not be right to come to battle with the Athenians if we no longer catch them in Boeotia. For they have come from a country on our border, built a fort in Boeotia, and mean to ravage it; and surely they are enemies, in whatever place they are caught and wherever they come from to commit acts of war. Now, if anyone thought it the safer course, let him change his mind. For men attacked by another, forethought for their own country does not allow the same calculation as for a man who holds what is his own and, reaching out for more, attacks someone of his own free will. It is your ancestral custom to repel a foreign army that comes against you, whether in your own land or in a neighbor’s alike. Against the Athenians, who are our neighbors besides, this is needed most of all. For everyone’s freedom consists in being a match for the neighbors; and against these men above all, who try to enslave not only those near but those far away, how can we not go to the last extremity of the struggle? (We have as an example the Euboeans across the strait, and how most of the rest of Hellas stands with them.) We must recognize that while other neighbors fight battles over the boundaries of their land, for us, if we are defeated, one boundary, beyond dispute, will be fixed for the whole country; for they will come in and hold what is ours by force. So much more dangerous than others’ is the neighbor we have. It is the habit of those who, trusting in their strength, attack their neighbors, as the Athenians are doing now, to march more fearlessly against the man who stays quiet and defends himself only in his own land, and to be less ready to grapple with the man who goes out to meet them beyond his borders and, if he has the chance, begins the war himself. We have experience of this with these very men: when we defeated them at Coronea,⁶ at the time when they had seized our land while we were in civil strife, we established great security for Boeotia that has lasted to this day. Remembering this, the older men among us must be like their former deeds, and the younger, the sons of fathers who proved brave then, must try not to disgrace the courage that is their inheritance. Trusting that the god whose sanctuary they have fortified and are occupying in defiance of the law will be on our side, and trusting the sacrifices, which have proved favorable to us, we must close with these men and show them that they may get what they want by attacking those who do not defend themselves; but from men whose noble custom it is always to free their own land in battle and not unjustly to enslave another’s, they will not go away without a fight.”

93 With such exhortations Pagondas persuaded the Boeotians to march against the Athenians. He broke camp quickly and led the army on (for it was already late in the day), and when he had come near their army he halted at a place where, because a hill lay between them, the two sides could not see each other, and there he drew up his men and made ready for battle. Hippocrates was at Delium when word was brought to him that the Boeotians were advancing. He sent to the army, ordering it to form up in line, and not long afterward came up himself, having left about three hundred horsemen at Delium, both to guard it in case anyone attacked it and to watch for an opportunity to fall on the Boeotians during the battle. The Boeotians posted a detachment to deal with these, and when everything was ready, they appeared over the top of the hill and grounded their arms in the order in which they meant to fight: about seven thousand hoplites, more than ten thousand light-armed troops, a thousand horsemen, and five hundred peltasts. The Thebans and those grouped with them held the right wing; in the center were the men of Haliartus, Coronea, and Copae and the others who live around the lake; the left was held by the men of Thespiae, Tanagra, and Orchomenus. On each wing were the horsemen and the light-armed troops. The Thebans were drawn up twenty-five shields deep, the others as each happened to be. Such were the forces of the Boeotians and their order of battle.

94 On the Athenian side, the hoplites, who were about equal in number to the enemy, were drawn up eight deep along the whole line, with the horsemen on each wing. Regularly armed light troops were not present on this occasion, nor did the city have any. Those who had joined in the invasion, many times more numerous than the enemy’s, had for the most part followed without arms, since this was a general levy of the foreigners present and the citizens; and having been the first to start for home, they were not there, except for a few. When the troops had taken their places in line and were about to engage, Hippocrates the general went along the Athenian army encouraging them, and spoke as follows.

95 “Athenians, my exhortation will be brief, but to brave men it has the same force, and it is more a reminder than a command. Let none of you think that we are taking this great risk in a foreign country, where we have no business. The struggle will be in their land, but it will be for ours; and if we win, the Peloponnesians will never again invade your country without the Boeotian cavalry, and in one battle you will gain this land and set that one more fully free. So advance against them in a manner worthy of the city, which each of you is proud to have as his country, the first in Hellas, and worthy of your fathers, who once defeated these men in battle under Myronides at Oenophyta⁷ and held Boeotia.”

96 While Hippocrates was giving this exhortation and had got as far as the middle of the army but had no time for the rest, the Boeotians, after Pagondas had again given them a brief exhortation there as well, raised the paean and came on from the hill. The Athenians advanced against them and they met at a run. The outermost wings of both armies did not come to blows, but both were checked alike: watercourses stood between them. The rest of the line was locked in a hard fight, shield pushing against shield. The Boeotian left, as far as the center, was beaten by the Athenians, who pressed hard on the others in that quarter and not least on the Thespians. For when the men drawn up beside them gave way, the Thespians were surrounded in a narrow space, and those of them who perished were cut down fighting hand to hand; and some of the Athenians, thrown into confusion by the encircling movement, failed to recognize one another and killed each other. On that side, then, the Boeotians were beaten and fled to the part of the line that was still fighting. But the right, where the Thebans were, was getting the better of the Athenians; they pushed them back, little by little at first, and followed them up. Then Pagondas sent two squadrons of cavalry around the hill out of sight, because his left was in trouble, and when they suddenly appeared over the top, the victorious wing of the Athenians, thinking that another army was coming against them, took fright. And so, on both sides now, because of this and because of the Thebans following up and breaking through, the whole Athenian army was put to flight. Some made for Delium and the sea, some for Oropus, others for Mount Parnes, and others wherever each had some hope of safety. The Boeotians followed them up and killed them, especially their horsemen and the Locrians, who had come to their aid just as the rout was beginning; but night overtook the action, and the mass of the fugitives got away more easily. The next day the men from Oropus and from Delium, leaving a garrison in Delium (for they still held it nonetheless), were carried home by sea.

97 The Boeotians set up a trophy, took up their own dead, stripped those of the enemy, and left a guard over them; then they withdrew to Tanagra and made plans to attack Delium. A herald from the Athenians, coming for the dead, met a Boeotian herald, who turned him back, telling him that he would accomplish nothing until he himself had returned. The Boeotian herald then came before the Athenians and delivered the message from the Boeotians: that they had acted unjustly in transgressing the customs of the Hellenes. It was a rule established among all, he said, that when they invaded one another’s country they kept their hands off the sanctuaries in it; but the Athenians had fortified Delium and were living in it, and everything that men do in an unconsecrated place was being done there; and they were drawing for their own use the water that the Boeotians themselves were forbidden to touch except for the lustral water used in the rites. Therefore, on behalf of the god and of themselves, the Boeotians, calling on the divinities who shared the altar and on Apollo, gave them notice to leave the sanctuary and then take away what belonged to them.

98 When the herald had said this, the Athenians sent their own herald to the Boeotians. They said that they had done no wrong to the sanctuary and would do it no harm in the future if they could help it; for they had not entered it with that purpose in the first place, but in order to defend themselves from it against those who were really wronging them. The law among the Hellenes, they said, was that whoever held power over a land, whether larger or smaller, also always had possession of its sanctuaries, to be tended in the customary ways as far as they were able. For the Boeotians too, and most others who had driven people out and held their land by force, had at first attacked sanctuaries that were not theirs and now possessed them as their own. They themselves, if they had been able to conquer more of the Boeotians’ land, would have held that too; as it was, they would not willingly leave the part where they were, since they regarded it as their own. As for the water, they had disturbed it under necessity, which they had not brought on themselves out of insolence: they had been forced to use it while defending themselves against the Boeotians, who had first invaded their land. And it was reasonable that anything done under the constraint of war and of some danger should find pardon even with the god. For the altars were a refuge for involuntary offenses, and the name of lawlessness was given to wrongs done without necessity, not to those who had ventured something under pressure of misfortune. The Boeotians, they said, were far more impious in demanding sanctuaries in exchange for the dead than they themselves, who refused to recover what was their due at the price of sanctuaries. And they told them to say plainly that they might take up their dead not on condition of leaving the land of the Boeotians (for they were no longer in the Boeotians’ land but in land they had won by the spear), but under a truce according to ancestral custom.

99 The Boeotians answered that if they were in Boeotia, they must leave their land and then take away what was theirs; but if they were in their own land, the Athenians themselves knew what to do. They thought that the territory of Oropus, where the dead happened to be lying, since the battle had been fought on the border, belonged to the Athenians as a subject district, and that the Athenians could not get possession of the bodies against the Boeotians’ will; and of course they would not make a truce for the Athenians’ own land. But to answer “leave our land and take back what you ask for” seemed to them a plausible reply. The Athenian herald heard this and went away with nothing accomplished.

100 The Boeotians at once sent for javelin men and slingers from the Malian Gulf, and with two thousand Corinthian hoplites who had come to help them after the battle, the Peloponnesian garrison that had come out of Nisaea, and some Megarians as well, they marched against Delium and attacked the fortification. Among other methods they tried, they brought up an engine, which took it, of the following kind. They sawed a great beam in two, hollowed it out all along, and fitted it together again exactly, like a pipe. At the end they hung a cauldron on chains, and an iron tube ran down into it from the beam, which was itself plated with iron for a great part of its length. They brought it up from a distance on wagons to the part of the wall that had been built mostly of vines and timber; and when it was close, they inserted large bellows into their own end of the beam and worked them. The blast, passing airtight into the cauldron, which held lighted coals, sulfur, and pitch, made a great flame and set the wall on fire, so that no one could stay on it any longer; the defenders abandoned it and fled, and in this way the fortification was taken. Of the garrison, some were killed and two hundred were captured; most of the rest got on board the ships and were carried home.

101 Delium was taken on the seventeenth day after the battle, and the herald from the Athenians, who knew nothing of what had happened, came again not long afterward about the dead; this time the Boeotians gave them back and no longer made the same answer. In the battle a little less than five hundred of the Boeotians were killed, and of the Athenians a little less than a thousand, with Hippocrates the general, besides a great number of light-armed troops and baggage carriers. Shortly after this battle Demosthenes too, since the betrayal at Siphae had not come off when he sailed there, made a landing in the territory of Sicyon with the army he had on his ships, the Acarnanians and Agraeans and four hundred Athenian hoplites. Before all the ships had come in to shore, the Sicyonians came to the rescue, routed those who had landed, and chased them back to the ships, killing some and taking others alive. They set up a trophy and gave back the dead under a truce. About the same days as the events at Delium, Sitalces, king of the Odrysians, also died, after marching against the Triballi and being defeated in battle. Seuthes son of Sparadocus, his nephew, became king of the Odrysians and of the rest of the part of Thrace that Sitalces had ruled.

102 In the same winter Brasidas, with the allies in the Thracian region, marched against Amphipolis, the Athenian colony on the river Strymon. Aristagoras of Miletus, when he was fleeing from King Darius, had tried before to settle the site on which the city now stands, but he was driven off by the Edonians; and then thirty-two years later the Athenians tried it, sending ten thousand settlers, from their own people and any others who wished to go, and these were destroyed at Drabescus by the Thracians. In the twenty-ninth year after that the Athenians came again, with Hagnon son of Nicias sent out as founder, drove out the Edonians, and founded the place, which had formerly been called the Nine Ways.⁸ They set out from Eion, a trading post they held on the sea at the mouth of the river, twenty-five stades from the present city. Hagnon named it Amphipolis because, with the Strymon flowing around it on both sides, he cut it off with a long wall from river to river and settled it as a city conspicuous both toward the sea and toward the land.

103 It was against this city, then, that Brasidas set out with his army from Arnae in Chalcidice. Arriving toward evening at Aulon and Bormiscus, where Lake Bolbe flows out into the sea, he had his men eat supper and marched on through the night. It was stormy and snowing a little, which made him all the more eager to press on, because he wanted to escape the notice of the people in Amphipolis, except for those who were betraying it. For there were settlers from Argilus living in it (the Argilians are colonists of the Andrians), and others who were working with them, some at the prompting of Perdiccas, some of the Chalcidians. Above all the Argilians, who lived close by, had always been suspect to the Athenians and had designs on the place. When the opportunity came and Brasidas arrived, they had already for some time been negotiating with their fellow citizens who lived there to have the city betrayed; and now they received him into their own city, revolted from the Athenians, and that same night, before dawn, brought the army to the bridge over the river. The town is some distance from the crossing, and walls did not run down to it then as they do now, but a small guard had been posted. Brasidas easily forced it, partly because of the treachery, partly because of the storm and the surprise of his attack; he crossed the bridge and at once had possession of everything belonging to the Amphipolitans who lived outside the walls throughout the whole district.

104 His crossing had come suddenly upon the people in the city, and of those outside many were being captured and others were fleeing into the walls; the Amphipolitans were thrown into great confusion, especially as they were suspicious of one another. And it is said that if Brasidas had not been willing to let his army turn to plunder, but had marched straight on the city, he would probably have taken it. As it was, he settled his army there after overrunning the area outside, and when nothing came of what he expected from those inside, he waited. Those opposed to the traitors, prevailing by their numbers so that the gates were not opened at once, joined Eucles the general, who had come from Athens to guard the place, in sending to the other general in the Thracian region, Thucydides son of Olorus, who wrote this history. He was at Thasos (the island is a colony of the Parians, about half a day’s sail from Amphipolis), and they asked him to come to their aid. When he heard, he sailed at full speed with seven ships that happened to be there, wishing above all to reach Amphipolis before it gave in, or, failing that, to seize Eion first.

105 Meanwhile Brasidas, fearing the relief by sea from Thasos, and learning that Thucydides held rights to work gold mines in that part of Thrace and through them was among the most influential men of the mainland, made haste to gain the city first, if he could. He feared that if Thucydides arrived, the people of Amphipolis would hope that he would gather allies from the sea and from Thrace and save them, and would then no longer come over. He therefore offered moderate terms, making the following proclamation: any of the Amphipolitans and Athenians in the city who wished might stay in possession of his own property, sharing equal and like rights; anyone unwilling might leave within five days, taking his property with him.

106 When the mass of the people heard this, their minds changed, especially as only a small part of the citizen body was Athenian and most were of mixed origin, and many of those inside had relatives among the men captured outside. They regarded the proclamation as fair compared with what they feared: the Athenians because they would be glad to get out, since they thought the danger was not the same for them as for the others and at the same time did not expect help soon; the rest of the population because they would not lose their city and their equal rights, and would be released from danger beyond their expectation. So the party working for Brasidas now justified the terms openly, seeing that the people had turned and were no longer listening to the Athenian general who was there; and the agreement was made, and they accepted him on the terms he had proclaimed. In this way they surrendered the city. Thucydides and the ships sailed into Eion late on the same day. Brasidas had just taken Amphipolis, and he came within a night of taking Eion; for if the ships had not come to its aid quickly, it would have been taken at dawn.

107 After this Thucydides set things in order at Eion, so that it would be safe both at once, if Brasidas attacked, and afterward; and he received those who had chosen to come there from upriver under the terms of the agreement. Brasidas suddenly sailed down the river to Eion with many boats, to see whether he could take the point that juts out from the wall and so control the entrance, and at the same time tried an attack by land; but he was beaten off on both sides, and he turned to setting the affairs of Amphipolis in order. Myrcinus, an Edonian town, came over to him, after Pittacus, the king of the Edonians, had been killed by the sons of Goaxis and by his own wife Brauro; and not long afterward Galepsus and Oesyme, which are colonies of the Thasians. Perdiccas too came immediately after the capture and helped him to settle these matters.

108 With Amphipolis in enemy hands, the Athenians fell into great alarm. The city was valuable to them for the timber it sent for shipbuilding and for the revenue it brought in. Besides, the Lacedaemonians had had a way open as far as the Strymon to reach the Athenian allies, with the Thessalians conducting them; but so long as they did not hold the bridge, since above it the river forms a large lake for a long way and on the side toward Eion they were watched by triremes, they could not have gone further; now it seemed that this had become easy. And they were afraid that their allies would revolt. For Brasidas was moderate in his conduct generally, and in his speeches he declared everywhere that he had been sent out to free Hellas. The cities subject to the Athenians, hearing of the capture of Amphipolis, of the terms he offered, and of his mildness, were more eager than ever for revolt. They sent messages to him secretly, urging him to come, each wanting to be the first to revolt. For it seemed to them that there was nothing to fear. They were mistaken about the Athenians’ power, which was as great as it afterward proved to be; and they judged more by uncertain wishes than by sure foresight, for it is the habit of men to entrust what they desire to unthinking hope, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not want. At the same time the Athenians had just been beaten in Boeotia, and Brasidas was saying what was enticing but not true: that at Nisaea the Athenians had not been willing to engage him with his own army alone. So they took heart and were confident that no one would come against them. Most of all, because of the pleasure of the moment, and because they would be making their first trial of the Lacedaemonians at a time when the Lacedaemonians were full of zeal, they were ready to run any risk. Seeing this, the Athenians sent garrisons to the cities, as far as was possible at short notice and in winter. Brasidas sent to Lacedaemon asking them to send him more troops, and himself prepared to build triremes on the Strymon. But the Lacedaemonians did not support him, partly out of jealousy on the part of their leading men, and partly because they wanted rather to recover the men from the island and to end the war.

109 In the same winter the Megarians captured the Long Walls, which the Athenians had been holding, and razed them to the ground. And Brasidas, after the capture of Amphipolis, marched with his allies against the so-called Acte. This is the peninsula that projects from the King’s canal, and its high mountain, Athos, ends it at the Aegean Sea. Its cities are Sane, a colony of the Andrians, right by the canal, facing the sea toward Euboea, and the others, Thyssus, Cleonae, Acrothoi, Olophyxus, and Dium. These are inhabited by mixed peoples of barbarians who speak two languages. There is a small Chalcidian element, but most are Pelasgians, of those Tyrrhenians who once lived in Lemnos and Athens, and Bisaltians, Crestonians, and Edonians; they live in small towns. Most of them came over to Brasidas, but Sane and Dium held out, and he stayed there with his army and ravaged their land.

110 When they would not listen, he marched at once against Torone in Chalcidice, which was held by the Athenians. A few men were inviting him, ready to hand over the city. He arrived while it was still night, and toward daybreak he halted with his army near the temple of the Dioscuri, about three stades from the city. The rest of the city of Torone and the Athenians in garrison did not notice him; but those working for him knew that he would come, and a few of them had gone out secretly and were watching for his approach. When they knew he was there, they brought in to themselves seven light-armed men with daggers (for of twenty first assigned, only these seven were not afraid to go in; their leader was Lysistratus of Olynthus). These slipped through the wall on the seaward side and, without being noticed, went up and killed the guards at the highest guardpost (for the city is on a hill), and began to break open the postern facing Canastraeum.

111 Brasidas, after advancing a little, waited with the rest of his army, and sent ahead a hundred peltasts so that, whenever any gates were opened and the signal that had been agreed was raised, they might be the first to rush in. As time went by and they were wondering at the delay, they gradually came up close to the city. The Toronaeans inside who were making the preparations with the men who had entered, once the postern had been broken open and the gates by the marketplace had been opened by cutting through the bar, first brought some men around and let them in through the postern, so as suddenly to terrify, from behind and on both sides, the people in the city, who knew nothing; then they raised the fire signal as had been arranged, and let in the rest of the peltasts through the gates by the marketplace.

112 When Brasidas saw the signal he set off at a run, rousing his army, who raised a shout all together and struck great terror into the people in the city. Some of them burst in at once through the gates, others over some squared beams that happened to be lying against the wall, which had fallen down and was being rebuilt, for hauling up stones. Brasidas and the main body at once turned upward to the high parts of the city, wishing to take it from the top and securely; the rest of the crowd scattered in every direction alike.

113 While the city was being taken, most of the Toronaeans, who knew nothing, were in confusion, but the plotters and those who approved of what they were doing at once joined the men who had come in. The Athenians (about fifty hoplites happened to be sleeping in the marketplace), when they realized what was happening, lost a few men killed there fighting hand to hand; of the rest, some by land and some on board the two ships that were on guard got away and escaped to Lecythus, the fort that they had seized and were holding, a height of the city that runs out into the sea, cut off by a narrow isthmus. Those of the Toronaeans who were friendly to them also fled to them there.

114 When it was full day and the city was firmly held, Brasidas made a proclamation to the Toronaeans who had fled with the Athenians that any who wished might come out to their property and live as citizens without fear. To the Athenians he sent a herald and told them to leave Lecythus under a truce, with their property, since it belonged to the Chalcidians. They said that they would not leave it, but asked him to grant them a truce for one day to take up their dead. He granted two. During these he himself strengthened the houses nearby, and the Athenians their own position. He called an assembly of the Toronaeans and spoke to them much as he had to the people of Acanthus. He said that it was not right to regard those who had worked with him for the taking of the city as worse men or as traitors (for they had not done this to enslave it, nor because they were bribed, but for the good and freedom of the city); nor should those who had taken no part think that they would not get the same treatment; for he had not come to destroy either a city or any private man. He had made the proclamation to those who had fled to the Athenians for this reason: that he thought them no worse for their friendship with them; and once they had tried the Lacedaemonians, he did not think they would be less well disposed toward them, but far more, the more justly the Lacedaemonians acted; it was only from inexperience that they were afraid now. He told them all to prepare to be steadfast allies, and to be held responsible from now on for whatever wrong they did; as for the past, it was not the Lacedaemonians who had been wronged, but rather the Toronaeans, by others who were stronger, and it was pardonable if they had opposed him in anything.

115 After saying this and encouraging them, when the truce had expired he began his attacks on Lecythus. The Athenians defended themselves from a poor fortification and from houses that had battlements, and for one day they beat off the attack. On the next day the enemy were about to bring up an engine against them, from which they meant to throw fire onto the wooden breastworks; and as the army was already advancing, at the point where they thought the enemy would most likely bring up the engine and which was most open to attack, the Athenians set up a wooden tower on top of a building and carried up many jars and casks of water and large stones, and many men climbed up. But the building, taking too great a load, suddenly broke down with a great crash. The Athenians who were near and saw it were more distressed than frightened; but those farther off, and especially those farthest away, thought that the place had already been taken at that point, and fled to the sea and the ships.

116 When Brasidas saw that they were leaving the battlements, and saw what was happening, he charged with his army, took the fort at once, and killed everyone he caught in it. The Athenians, having abandoned the place in this way, crossed over in their boats and ships to Pallene. Now there is a temple of Athena in Lecythus, and Brasidas had proclaimed, when he was about to attack, that he would give thirty minas of silver to the first man to mount the wall. Thinking that the capture had come about by some means other than human, he gave the thirty minas to the goddess for the temple, and he pulled down Lecythus, cleared the site, and dedicated the whole of it as a sacred precinct. For the rest of the winter he settled the places he held and laid plans against the others. So the winter ended, and with it the eighth year of this war.

117 At the very beginning of spring the following summer, the Lacedaemonians and Athenians made an armistice for a year. The Athenians thought that Brasidas would then bring no more of their cities to revolt before they could prepare at leisure, and at the same time that, if it suited them, they could also come to a general settlement. The Lacedaemonians believed that the Athenians feared just what they did in fact fear, and that, once they had a respite from troubles and hardship and had tasted it, they would be more eager to be reconciled, give back the men, and make a treaty for a longer time. For they set great store by getting the men back while Brasidas was still having good fortune; whereas if he went further and put matters on an equal footing, they would lose the men, and for the rest would be defending themselves on even terms, running risks even if they prevailed. So the armistice was made, for themselves and their allies, as follows.

118 “Concerning the sanctuary and oracle of Pythian Apollo, we resolve that anyone who wishes may consult it without fraud and without fear, according to the ancestral laws. This is resolved by the Lacedaemonians and the allies present; and they say that they will do their best to persuade the Boeotians and Phocians by sending heralds to them. Concerning the treasure of the god, we are to take care to discover those who have done wrong, rightly and justly following the ancestral laws, you and we and any others who wish, all following the ancestral laws. Concerning these matters, then, it is resolved by the Lacedaemonians and the other allies as stated. The following is further resolved by the Lacedaemonians and the other allies, if the Athenians make a treaty: that each side shall remain in its own territory, holding what we now hold. Those in Coryphasium⁹ shall stay within the hills of Buphras and Tomeus. Those in Cythera shall have no dealings with the alliance, neither we with them nor they with us. Those in Nisaea and Minoa shall not cross the road that runs from the gate by the shrine of Nisus to the temple of Poseidon, and from the temple of Poseidon straight to the bridge leading to Minoa (nor shall the Megarians and their allies cross this road); and the Athenians shall keep the island that they took, with no dealings on either side with the other; and in Troezen they shall keep what they now hold, according to the terms agreed with the Athenians. In using the sea, as far as concerns their own coasts and the coasts of their alliance, the Lacedaemonians and their allies shall sail in no warship, but in any other oared vessel of up to five hundred talents’ burden. A herald and an embassy, with as many attendants as they think fit, traveling to the Peloponnese or to Athens to end the war and to settle disputes, shall have safe conduct going and returning, by land and by sea. During this time deserters shall not be received, whether free or slave, by you or by us. You shall give satisfaction to us and we to you according to ancestral custom, settling disputed questions by arbitration without war. This is resolved by the Lacedaemonians and the allies; but if anything seems to you either better or more just than this, come to Lacedaemon and explain it; for neither the Lacedaemonians nor the allies will reject anything that you put forward as just. Let those who go, go with full powers, as you too require of us. The treaty shall be for one year. Resolved by the people. The tribe Acamantis held the prytany, Phaenippus was secretary, Niciades presided. Laches moved: with good fortune to the Athenians, to make the armistice on the terms to which the Lacedaemonians and their allies agree and to which they consented before the people; the armistice to be for one year, beginning this day, the fourteenth of the month of Elaphebolion.¹⁰ During this time envoys and heralds are to go to each other and hold talks on the terms on which the war shall be ended. The generals and the prytanes are to call an assembly, and the Athenians are to deliberate first about peace …¹¹ on whatever terms the embassy for ending the war shall bring in. The embassies now present are to bind themselves at once before the people by libation to abide by the treaty for the year.

119 “These terms were agreed by the Lacedaemonians and their allies with the Athenians and their allies at Lacedaemon on the twelfth of the month Gerastius. Those who agreed and poured the libations were, for the Lacedaemonians: Taurus son of Echetimidas, Athenaeus son of Periclidas, Philocharidas son of Eryxilaidas; for the Corinthians: Aeneas son of Ocytus, Euphamidas son of Aristonymus; for the Sicyonians: Damotimus son of Naucrates, Onasimus son of Megacles; for the Megarians: Nicasus son of Cecalus, Menecrates son of Amphidorus; for the Epidaurians: Amphias son of Eupaeidas; for the Athenians, the generals: Nicostratus son of Diitrephes, Nicias son of Niceratus, Autocles son of Tolmaeus.” This, then, was the armistice that was made, and throughout it they kept meeting for talks about a more lasting treaty.

120 About the days when they were going back and forth to make it, Scione, a city in Pallene, revolted from the Athenians to Brasidas. The Scionaeans say that they are Pellenians from the Peloponnese, and that their first ancestors, sailing back from Troy, were carried to this place by the storm that the Achaeans met with, and settled there. When they had revolted, Brasidas crossed over to Scione by night, with a friendly trireme sailing ahead while he himself followed some way behind in a light boat. His idea was that if he fell in with any vessel larger than the boat, the trireme would defend him; and if another trireme of equal strength came up, he thought it would turn not on the smaller craft but on the ship, and in the meantime he would get away safely. Having crossed, he called an assembly of the Scionaeans and said what he had said at Acanthus and Torone; and he added that they deserved the highest praise of all, because, although Pallene was cut off at the isthmus by the Athenians holding Potidaea and they were nothing more than islanders, they had come over to freedom of their own accord, and had not waited, through lack of daring, until necessity forced them toward what was plainly their own good. This was a sign, he said, that they would bravely endure any other trial, however great; and if matters turned out as he intended, he would regard them as in truth the most faithful friends of the Lacedaemonians and would honor them in every other way.

121 The Scionaeans were elated by his words, and all of them alike took courage, even those who had not liked what was being done before; they made up their minds to carry on the war with zeal, and gave Brasidas a fine reception in every way. Publicly they crowned him with a golden crown as the liberator of Hellas; privately they decked him with ribbons and came up to him as they would to an athlete. For the moment he left a small garrison with them and crossed back, and not long afterward he brought over a larger army, wishing with their help to make an attempt on Mende and Potidaea; for he thought that the Athenians would come to its relief as they would to an island, and he wanted to forestall them. Something was also being arranged for him in these cities by way of betrayal.

122 He was about to attack these cities when a trireme arrived with the men who were carrying round the news of the armistice, Aristonymus for the Athenians and Athenaeus for the Lacedaemonians. The army crossed back to Torone, and the envoys announced the agreement to Brasidas; and all the Lacedaemonian allies in the Thracian region accepted what had been done. Aristonymus agreed to the rest, but when he found, by counting the days, that the Scionaeans had revolted after the date, he said that they would not be included in the treaty. Brasidas argued at length that they had revolted before, and would not give up the city. When Aristonymus reported to Athens about them, the Athenians were at once ready to march against Scione. The Lacedaemonians sent envoys and said that the Athenians would be breaking the treaty; they laid claim to the city, trusting Brasidas, and were ready to have the question decided by arbitration. But the Athenians were not willing to risk arbitration; they wanted to march as quickly as possible, angry that even islanders, as these now were, should think fit to revolt from them, trusting in the land power of the Lacedaemonians, which could do them no good. And the truth about the revolt was rather as the Athenians maintained; for the Scionaeans revolted two days after. They at once passed a decree, on the motion of Cleon, to destroy Scione and put its people to death. And they kept quiet in other respects and prepared for this.

123 Meanwhile Mende revolted from them, a city in Pallene, a colony of the Eretrians. Brasidas received them, not thinking that he was doing wrong, because they had come over to him openly during the armistice; for there were things in which he too accused the Athenians of breaking the treaty. For this reason the Mendaeans were all the bolder, seeing that Brasidas was ready to act and judging from Scione that he would not betray them; and besides, those who were working with them were few, and once they had begun, they would not draw back, but, fearing for themselves if they were exposed, forced the many against their will. The Athenians, learning of it at once, were angrier still and prepared to move against both cities. Brasidas, expecting their attack, secretly removed the children and women of the Scionaeans and Mendaeans to Olynthus in Chalcidice, and sent across to them five hundred Peloponnesian hoplites and three hundred Chalcidian peltasts, with Polydamidas in command of them all. And they joined in getting their defenses ready, expecting the Athenians to arrive soon.

124 Meanwhile Brasidas and Perdiccas marched together a second time against Arrhabaeus in Lyncus. Perdiccas led the forces of the Macedonians he ruled and the hoplites of the Hellenes who lived among them; Brasidas, besides the Peloponnesians he had left, led Chalcidians, Acanthians, and as many as each of the others could supply. The Hellenic hoplites in all were about three thousand; the cavalry who went with them, Macedonians and Chalcidians together, were all told nearly a thousand; and there was besides a large crowd of barbarians. They invaded the country of Arrhabaeus, and finding the Lyncestians encamped against them, they encamped opposite them in turn. The infantry on each side held a hill, with a plain between; the horsemen rode down into it and there was first a cavalry engagement on both sides. Then the Lyncestian hoplites advanced first from their hill with their cavalry and were ready to fight; Brasidas and Perdiccas led their own men against them, engaged, and routed the Lyncestians, killing many, while the rest escaped to the heights and stayed quiet. After this they set up a trophy and waited two or three days for the Illyrians, who happened to be coming to Perdiccas as mercenaries. Then Perdiccas wanted to advance against the villages of Arrhabaeus and not sit still; but Brasidas, who was anxious about Mende, in case it should suffer something if the Athenians sailed there before him, and since the Illyrians had not appeared, was not eager to go on, but rather to withdraw.

125 While they were disagreeing over this, news came that the Illyrians had betrayed Perdiccas and gone over to Arrhabaeus. So both of them now thought it best to withdraw, out of fear of these men, who were warlike; but because of their quarrel nothing had been settled about when they should start, and night came on. The Macedonians and the mass of the barbarians at once took fright, as great armies are apt to be struck by panic for no clear reason; thinking that the enemy coming against them were many times more numerous than had actually come, and that they were all but there, they broke into sudden flight and made for home. Perdiccas, who at first did not know of it, they forced, when he learned of it, to go off before seeing Brasidas (for their camps were far apart). At dawn, when Brasidas saw that the Macedonians had gone on ahead and that the Illyrians and Arrhabaeus were about to attack, he himself formed his hoplites into a square, took the light-armed crowd into the middle, and prepared to retreat. He posted the youngest men to run out against the enemy wherever they attacked, and he himself, with three hundred picked men, intended to go last in the retreat and turn and beat off the foremost of the enemy as they pressed on him. Before the enemy came near, he gave his soldiers a hasty exhortation, as follows.

126 “Peloponnesians, if I did not suspect that you are alarmed because you have been left alone and because those coming against you are barbarians and many, I would not be giving you instruction along with my encouragement. But as it is, in view of our desertion by our own side and the numbers of the enemy, I will try, with a brief reminder and advice, to convince you of what matters most. It befits you to be brave in war, not because allies are present on each occasion, but because of your own courage, and not to fear any number of others; for you come from states where it is not the many who rule the few but rather the few who rule the many, and who won that power by nothing other than conquering in battle. As for the barbarians, whom you now fear from inexperience, you ought to learn, from the fighting you have already done against the Macedonians among them, and from what I myself infer and know from others by report, that they will not be formidable. For when an enemy that is in fact weak has the appearance of strength, true knowledge of them, once gained, has always made the defenders bolder; whereas against those who have some real advantage a man would attack with more daring if he had not known of it beforehand. These men are terrifying to the inexperienced in their threat of attack; for they are fearsome in the sight of their numbers and unbearable in the loudness of their cries, and their brandishing of weapons in the air gives some show of menace. But they are not the same in close combat with those who stand up to these things. Having no order, they would feel no shame at leaving any position when pressed; and since flight and attack have equal credit with them as honorable, their courage is never put to the test (and a battle in which each man is his own master would be most likely to give anyone a decent pretext for saving himself). They think it safer to frighten you without risk than to come to close quarters; otherwise they would have done that rather than this. You see clearly that all the terror they held out beforehand is in fact small, however alarming to the eye and ear. If you stand up to it as it comes on and, when the moment comes, withdraw again in good order and formation, you will reach safety the sooner, and you will know in future that such mobs, against those who withstand their first onset, make a show of courage from a distance with threats and delays; but against those who give way to them, they are quick to display their bravery at their heels, where it is safe.”

127 After this exhortation Brasidas began to lead his army back. When the barbarians saw it, they pressed on with loud shouting and uproar, thinking that he was running away and that they would catch and destroy him. But wherever they fell on them the skirmishers ran out to meet them, and he himself with his picked men withstood them as they pressed on; the Hellenes held firm, to the enemy’s surprise, against the first rush, and after that received and beat off their attacks, and when the enemy stopped, they themselves withdrew. Then the greater part of the barbarians left the Hellenes with Brasidas alone in the open country, leaving behind only a part to follow and attack them; the rest went at a run after the fleeing Macedonians, killing any they came upon, and got first to the pass, a narrow one between two hills leading into the country of Arrhabaeus, and seized it, knowing that Brasidas had no other way of retreat. As he was approaching the most difficult part of the road itself, they began to surround him in order to cut him off.

128 Seeing this, he ordered the three hundred who were with him to charge at a run, each as fast as he could, without keeping formation, at the hill he thought easier to take, and to try to drive off the barbarians who were already on it before the larger encircling force could join them there. They fell on them and overpowered the men on the hill, and the main body of the Hellenes now made its way to it more easily. For the barbarians took fright when their own men were routed there from the height, and they no longer followed any further, thinking that the enemy were already on the frontier and had escaped. Once Brasidas had gained the heights, he went on more safely and reached Arnisa, the first place in Perdiccas’ dominion, the same day. His soldiers, angry at the Macedonians for retreating ahead of them, unyoked and cut down any of their teams of oxen they came upon on the road, and took for themselves any baggage that had fallen off, as was likely to happen in a retreat by night and in panic. From this time Perdiccas for the first time regarded Brasidas as an enemy, and for the future he had a hatred of the Peloponnesians that was strange in him, given his feelings toward the Athenians; but, breaking away from what his vital interests required, he worked to find the quickest way to come to terms with the Athenians and be rid of the Peloponnesians.

129 On returning from Macedonia to Torone, Brasidas found the Athenians already in possession of Mende. He stayed quiet there, thinking it now beyond his power to cross over to Pallene and give help, but he kept Torone under guard. For about the same time as the events in Lyncus the Athenians had sailed against Mende and Scione, as they had been preparing to do, with fifty ships, ten of them Chian, a thousand of their own hoplites, six hundred archers, a thousand Thracian mercenaries, and other peltasts from their allies in the region; the generals were Nicias son of Niceratus and Nicostratus son of Diitrephes. Setting out from Potidaea with the ships and putting in at the temple of Poseidon, they advanced against the Mendaeans. These, with three hundred Scionaeans who had come to help them and the Peloponnesian auxiliaries, seven hundred hoplites in all, and Polydamidas their commander, happened to be encamped outside the city on a strong hill. Nicias, with 120 light-armed Methonaeans, sixty picked Athenian hoplites, and all the archers, tried to climb up to them by a path on the hill, but was wounded and could not force his way. Nicostratus, approaching by another way, from a greater distance, with all the rest of the army, against a hill that was hard to climb, was thrown into complete confusion, and the whole Athenian army came close to being defeated. On that day, since the Mendaeans and their allies did not give way, the Athenians withdrew and made camp; and when night came on the Mendaeans went back into the city.

130 The next day the Athenians sailed round to the side facing Scione, took the suburb, and spent the whole day ravaging the land, without anyone coming out against them (for there was some civil strife in the city); and on the following night the three hundred Scionaeans went home. The day after, Nicias with half the army advanced as far as the borders of Scione, ravaging the land as he went, while Nicostratus with the rest sat down before the city by the upper gates, where the road goes to Potidaea. Polydamidas (for the arms of the Mendaeans and the auxiliaries happened to be stacked in that quarter, inside the wall) drew up his men as for battle and urged the Mendaeans to make a sortie. One of the popular party answered him, in a spirit of faction, that he would not go out and that there was no need to fight; and when he said this, Polydamidas dragged him by the arm and roughly handled him. At that the people at once took up their arms in a fury and went for the Peloponnesians and for those of their own side who had acted against them with them. They fell on them and routed them, partly by the suddenness of the fight, and partly because the Peloponnesians were frightened as the gates were opened to the Athenians; for they thought that the attack had been made on them by some prior arrangement. Those who were not killed at once fled to the acropolis, which they had held before as well. The Athenians (for Nicias had by now turned back and was at the city) burst into the city of Mende, and since it had been opened not under any agreement, they sacked it with their whole army, as if they had taken it by storm; and the generals had difficulty in restraining them from killing the inhabitants too. After this they told the Mendaeans to keep their constitution as they had been accustomed, and to judge among themselves any whom they thought responsible for the revolt. Those on the acropolis they walled off with a wall on each side running down to the sea, and set a guard over them. When they had matters around Mende in hand, they marched against Scione.

131 The Scionaeans and the Peloponnesians came out against them and took up a position on a strong hill in front of the city, which the enemy had to take before they could wall the city in. The Athenians attacked it in force, drove off the men on it in battle, encamped, set up a trophy, and prepared for the siege wall. Not long after, when they were already at work, the auxiliaries who were being besieged on the acropolis at Mende forced their way through the guard by the sea at night and arrived, and most of them, slipping past the army before Scione, got into the city.

132 While Scione was being walled in, Perdiccas sent a herald to the Athenian generals and came to an agreement with the Athenians, because of his enmity toward Brasidas over the retreat from Lyncus; he had begun to negotiate immediately after it. And it happened that at that time Ischagoras the Lacedaemonian was about to lead an army by land to Brasidas. Perdiccas, partly because Nicias told him, now that the agreement had been made, to give the Athenians some clear proof of his good faith, and partly because he himself no longer wanted the Peloponnesians to come into his country, worked on his friends in Thessaly, with whose leading men he was always on close terms, and blocked the army and its preparations so completely that they did not even try the Thessalians. Ischagoras, however, with Ameinias and Aristeus, did reach Brasidas himself, sent by the Lacedaemonians to inspect the state of affairs; and, contrary to custom, they brought out from Sparta some of the young men, to put them in command of the cities rather than entrust these to whoever happened to be there. Clearidas son of Cleonymus was installed at Amphipolis, and Pasitelidas son of Hegesander at Torone.

133 In the same summer the Thebans pulled down the wall of Thespiae, on the charge of Atticism. They had always wanted to do this, and it was now made easier because whatever flower of manhood the Thespians had had perished in the battle against the Athenians. In the same summer the temple of Hera at Argos was burned down, when Chrysis the priestess placed a lighted lamp near the garlands and then fell asleep, so that everything caught fire and was burning before anyone noticed. Chrysis, fearing the Argives, fled at once that very night to Phlius; and they appointed another priestess under the established law, named Phaeinis. Chrysis had served for eight years of this war and half of the ninth when she fled.¹² And toward the end of the summer Scione was completely walled in, and the Athenians left a garrison there and withdrew with the rest of their army.

134 In the following winter, matters between the Athenians and Lacedaemonians were quiet because of the armistice. But the Mantineans and the Tegeans, each with their allies, fought a battle at Laodocium in Oresthis, and the victory was disputed. For each side routed the wing opposite it, and both set up trophies and sent spoils to Delphi. Many were killed on each side, the battle was evenly fought, and night broke off the action; the Tegeans camped on the field and at once set up a trophy, while the Mantineans withdrew to Bucolion and set up a trophy in reply afterward.

135 At the end of the same winter, toward spring, Brasidas also made an attempt on Potidaea. He came up at night and set a ladder against the wall, and got that far without being noticed; for the ladder was set up in the interval after the bell had been passed along, before the man who passed it on had come back. But then, as the defenders noticed at once, he led his army back again in haste before anyone mounted, and did not wait for day. So the winter ended, and with it the ninth year of this war, which Thucydides recorded.

Notes

1. 1. Pylos: a headland on the west coast of Messenia, at the north end of the bay of Navarino, which the island of Sphacteria closes off. The Messenians of Naupactus were descendants of the Helots and Messenians whom the Athenians settled there after the revolt of the 460s BC (1.103).

2. 2. The Attic choenix (dry measure) was a little over a liter; the cotyle (liquid measure) about a quarter of a liter.

3. 3. The Thirty Years’ Peace of 446/445 BC (1.115).

4. 4. Artaxerxes I died in the winter of 425/424 BC.

5. 5. The Greek text is corrupt at this point; the translation gives the generally accepted sense.

6. 6. Coronea: Boeotian victory of 447 BC, which ended the Athenian control of Boeotia won at Oenophyta.

7. 7. Oenophyta: Athenian victory over the Boeotians in 457 BC under Myronides, after which Athens dominated Boeotia for ten years.

8. 8. The Nine Ways (Ennea Hodoi): the earlier name of the site. Aristagoras’ attempt was in 497 BC, the failed Athenian settlement in 465 BC, and Hagnon’s foundation of Amphipolis in 437 BC.

9. 9. Coryphasium: Pylos (4.3), held by the Athenians since 425 BC. Buphras and Tomeus were heights nearby.

10. 10. Elaphebolion: an Athenian month, roughly March–April; the armistice dates to 423 BC. Gerastius (4.119) is a Spartan month.

11. 11. The Greek text is defective here; some words are lost.

12. 12. Chrysis: priestess of Hera at Argos, by whose years of office Thucydides dated the outbreak of the war (2.2). The fire was in 423 BC.