History of the Peloponnesian War

Sucl were the words of Pericles: and the Athenians, thinking that he was advising them for the best, voted as he directed, and answered the Lacedaemonians according to his bidding, both as regards the particulars as he set them forth and on the whole question, to the effect that they would do nothing upon dictation, but were ready in accordance with the treaty to have all complaints adjusted by arbitration on a fair and equal basis. So the Lacedaemonian envoys went back home and thereafter came on no further missions.

These were the grounds of complaint and the causes of disagreement on both sides before the war, and they began to appear immediately after the affair of Epidamnus and Corcyra. Nevertheless the two parties continued to have intercourse with one another during these recriminations and visited each other without heralds,[*](i.e. without the formalities which are indispensable after war is declared.) though not without suspicion; for the events which were taking place constituted an actual annulment of the treaty and furnished an occasion for war.

AT this point in my narrative begins the account of the actual warfare between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians and their respective allies. While it continued they ceased having communication with one another except through heralds, and when once they were at war they waged it without intermission. The events of the war have been recorded in the order of their occurrence, summer by summer and winter by winter.[*](The mode of reckoning customary in the time of Thucydides and continued long afterwards. In such a scheme the summer included the spring and the winter the autumn; the summer period was equal to about eight months, the winter to about four.)

For fourteen years the thirty years' truce which had been concluded after the capture of Euboea remained unbroken; but in the fifteenth year, when Chrysis was in the forty-eighth year of her priesthood[*](The commencement of the war is fixed according to the forms of reckoning customary in the three most important Hellenic states.) at Argos, and Aenesias was ephor at Sparta, and Pythodorus had still four months to serve as archon at Athens, in the sixteenth month after the battle of Potidaea, at the opening of[*](431 B.C.) spring, some Thebans, a little more than three hundred in number, under the command of the Boeotarchs Pythangelus son of Phyleidas and Diemporus son of Onetoridas, about the first watch of the night entered under arms into Plataea, a They had been invited over by some Plataeans, Naucleides and his partisans, who opened the gates for them, intending, with a view to getting power into their hands, to destroy the citizens who were of the opposite party and make over the city to

the Thebans. And they had conducted their intrigue through Eurymachus son of Leontiades, a man of great influence

at Thebes. For, as Plataea was always at variance with them, the Thebans, foreseeing that the war[*](i.e. the war between Athens and Sparta.) was coming, wished to get possession of it while there was still peace and before the war had yet been openly declared. And so they found it easier to make their entry unobserved, because no watch had been set to guard

the city. And when they had grounded their arms in the market-place, instead of following the advice of those who had invited them over, namely to set to work at once and enter the houses of their enemies, they determined rather to try conciliatory proclamations and to bring the city to an amicable agreement. The proclamation made by herald was that, if anyone wished to be an ally according to the hereditary usages of the whole body of the Boeotians, he should take his weapons and join them. For they thought that in this way the city would easily be induced to come over to their side.

And the Plataeans, when they became aware that the Thebans were inside, and that the city had been taken by surprise, took fright, and, as it was night and they could not see, thinking that a far greater number had come in, they concluded to make terms, and, accepting the proposals made to them, raised no disturbance, especially as the Thebans did no violence to anyone.

But, as it happened, while they were negotiating the terms they perceived that the Thebans were few in number, and thought that by an attack they might easily overpower them; for it was not the wish of the majority of the Plataeans to withdraw from the Athenian alliance.