History of the Peloponnesian War

After the treaty and the alliance between the Lacedaemonians and Athenians, which were concluded at the end of the ten years' war, in the ephorate of Pleistolas at Lacedaemon and the archonship of Alcaeus at Athens, those who accepted these were at peace; but the Corinthians and some of the cities in the Peloponnesus attempted to disturb the agreements, and at once other trouble also began between Lacedaemon and her allies.

At the same time, too, the Lacedaemonians, as time went on, incurred the suspicion of the Athenians, by not acting in some matters in accordance with the articles of the agreement.

For six years and ten months the two powers abstained from invading each other's territory; in other regions, however, there was only an unstable cessation of arms and they kept on doing each other the greatest possible damage. But at last they were forced to break the treaty which had been concluded after the first ten years, and again engaged in open war.

[*](This chapter forms a kind of second introduction, and was probably written after the author enlarged his plan from a history of the first ten years to that of the whole war.) The history of these events, also, has been written by the same Thucydides, an Athenian, in the chronological order of events, by summers and winters, up to the time when the Lacedaemonians and their allies put an end to the dominion of the Athenians and took the Long Walls and Peiraeus.[*](According to Plutarch, Lysander 15, this took place in April 404.) Up to that event the war lasted twenty-seven years in all;

and if anyone shall not deem it proper to include the intervening truce in the war, he will not judge aright. For let him but look at the question in the light of the facts as they have been set forth[*](Or, taking ἡ διὰ μέσου μέσου ξ)ύμβασις as subject of διῄρηται “For if he will but observe how the truce was interrupted by actual military operations”) and he will find that that can not fitly be judged a state of peace in which neither party restored or received all that had been agreed upon. And, apart from that, there were violations of the treaty on both sides in the Mantinean and Epidaurian wars,[*](For these wars, see chs. xxxiii. f. and liii. f.) as well as in other matters; the allies in Thrace, too, were no less hostile to Athens than before, and the Boeotians observed a truce which had to be renewed every ten days.

So that, including the first ten-years' war, the suspicious truce succeeding that, and the war which followed the truce, one will find that, reckoning according to natural seasons, there were just so many years as I have stated, and some few days over. He will also find, in the case of those who have made any assertion in reliance upon oracles, that this fact alone proved true;