History of the Peloponnesian War

For about twenty of these days, the period during which the envoys were absent negotiating the truce, they were regularly provisioned, but the rest of the time they lived on what was smuggled in. And indeed some grain was found on the island at the time of the capture, as well as other articles of food;

for the commander Epitadas was accustomed to give each man a scantier ration than his supplies would have allowed. The Athenians and Peloponnesians now withdrew from Pylos and returned home with their respective forces, and Cleon's promise, mad as it was, had been fulfilled; for within twenty days he brought the men as he had undertaken to do.

Of all the events of this war this came as the greatest surprise to the Hellenic world; for men could not conceive that the Lacedaemonians would ever be induced by hunger or any other compulsion to give up their arms, but thought that they would keep them till they died, fighting as long as they were able;

and they could not believe that those who had surrendered were as brave as those who had fallen. And when one of the Athenian allies sometime afterwards sneeringly asked one of the captives taken on the island, whether the Lacedaemonians who had been slain were brave men and true,[*](Implying that the survivors were not.) the answer was, that the shaft, meaning the arrow, would be worth a great deal if it could distinguish the brave, intimating that it was a mere matter of chance who was hit and killed by stones and bow-shots.