History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides [best free ebook reader TXT] 📗

be destroyed before the other arrived, the war

would be at an end.

 

While the contending parties in Sicily were thus engaged,

Demosthenes, having now got together the armament with which he was to

go to the island, put out from Aegina, and making sail for

Peloponnese, joined Charicles and the thirty ships of the Athenians.

Taking on board the heavy infantry from Argos they sailed to

Laconia, and, after first plundering part of Epidaurus Limera,

landed on the coast of Laconia, opposite Cythera, where the temple

of Apollo stands, and, laying waste part of the country, fortified a

sort of isthmus, to which the Helots of the Lacedaemonians might

desert, and from whence plundering incursions might be made as from

Pylos. Demosthenes helped to occupy this place, and then immediately

sailed on to Corcyra to take up some of the allies in that island, and

so to proceed without delay to Sicily; while Charicles waited until he

had completed the fortification of the place and, leaving a garrison

there, returned home subsequently with his thirty ships and the

Argives also.

 

This same summer arrived at Athens thirteen hundred targeteers,

Thracian swordsmen of the tribe of the Dii, who were to have sailed to

Sicily with Demosthenes. Since they had come too late, the Athenians

determined to send them back to Thrace, whence they had come; to

keep them for the Decelean war appearing too expensive, as the pay

of each man was a drachma a day. Indeed since Decelea had been first

fortified by the whole Peloponnesian army during this summer, and then

occupied for the annoyance of the country by the garrisons from the

cities relieving each other at stated intervals, it had been doing

great mischief to the Athenians; in fact this occupation, by the

destruction of property and loss of men which resulted from it, was

one of the principal causes of their ruin. Previously the invasions

were short, and did not prevent their enjoying their land during the

rest of the time: the enemy was now permanently fixed in Attica; at

one time it was an attack in force, at another it was the regular

garrison overrunning the country and making forays for its

subsistence, and the Lacedaemonian king, Agis, was in the field and

diligently prosecuting the war; great mischief was therefore done to

the Athenians. They were deprived of their whole country: more than

twenty thousand slaves had deserted, a great part of them artisans,

and all their sheep and beasts of burden were lost; and as the cavalry

rode out daily upon excursions to Decelea and to guard the country,

their horses were either lamed by being constantly worked upon rocky

ground, or wounded by the enemy.

 

Besides, the transport of provisions from Euboea, which had before

been carried on so much more quickly overland by Decelea from

Oropus, was now effected at great cost by sea round Sunium; everything

the city required had to be imported from abroad, and instead of a

city it became a fortress. Summer and winter the Athenians were worn

out by having to keep guard on the fortifications, during the day by

turns, by night all together, the cavalry excepted, at the different

military posts or upon the wall. But what most oppressed them was that

they had two wars at once, and had thus reached a pitch of frenzy

which no one would have believed possible if he had heard of it before

it had come to pass. For could any one have imagined that even when

besieged by the Peloponnesians entrenched in Attica, they would still,

instead of withdrawing from Sicily, stay on there besieging in like

manner Syracuse, a town (taken as a town) in no way inferior to

Athens, or would so thoroughly upset the Hellenic estimate of their

strength and audacity, as to give the spectacle of a people which,

at the beginning of the war, some thought might hold out one year,

some two, none more than three, if the Peloponnesians invaded their

country, now seventeen years after the first invasion, after having

already suffered from all the evils of war, going to Sicily and

undertaking a new war nothing inferior to that which they already

had with the Peloponnesians? These causes, the great losses from

Decelea, and the other heavy charges that fell upon them, produced

their financial embarrassment; and it was at this time that they

imposed upon their subjects, instead of the tribute, the tax of a

twentieth upon all imports and exports by sea, which they thought

would bring them in more money; their expenditure being now not the

same as at first, but having grown with the war while their revenues

decayed.

 

Accordingly, not wishing to incur expense in their present want of

money, they sent back at once the Thracians who came too late for

Demosthenes, under the conduct of Diitrephes, who was instructed, as

they were to pass through the Euripus, to make use of them if possible

in the voyage alongshore to injure the enemy. Diitrephes first

landed them at Tanagra and hastily snatched some booty; he then sailed

across the Euripus in the evening from Chalcis in Euboea and

disembarking in Boeotia led them against Mycalessus. The night he

passed unobserved near the temple of Hermes, not quite two miles

from Mycalessus, and at daybreak assaulted and took the town, which is

not a large one; the inhabitants being off their guard and not

expecting that any one would ever come up so far from the sea to

molest them, the wall too being weak, and in some places having

tumbled down, while in others it had not been built to any height, and

the gates also being left open through their feeling of security.

The Thracians bursting into Mycalessus sacked the houses and

temples, and butchered the inhabitants, sparing neither youth nor age,

but killing all they fell in with, one after the other, children and

women, and even beasts of burden, and whatever other living

creatures they saw; the Thracian race, like the bloodiest of the

barbarians, being even more so when it has nothing to fear. Everywhere

confusion reigned and death in all its shapes; and in particular

they attacked a boys’ school, the largest that there was in the place,

into which the children had just gone, and massacred them all. In

short, the disaster falling upon the whole town was unsurpassed in

magnitude, and unapproached by any in suddenness and in horror.

 

Meanwhile the Thebans heard of it and marched to the rescue, and

overtaking the Thracians before they had gone far, recovered the

plunder and drove them in panic to the Euripus and the sea, where

the vessels which brought them were lying. The greatest slaughter took

place while they were embarking, as they did not know how to swim, and

those in the vessels on seeing what was going on on on shore moored

them out of bowshot: in the rest of the retreat the Thracians made a

very respectable defence against the Theban horse, by which they

were first attacked, dashing out and closing their ranks according

to the tactics of their country, and lost only a few men in that

part of the affair. A good number who were after plunder were actually

caught in the town and put to death. Altogether the Thracians had

two hundred and fifty killed out of thirteen hundred, the Thebans

and the rest who came to the rescue about twenty, troopers and heavy

infantry, with Scirphondas, one of the Boeotarchs. The Mycalessians

lost a large proportion of their population.

 

While Mycalessus thus experienced a calamity for its extent as

lamentable as any that happened in the war, Demosthenes, whom we

left sailing to Corcyra, after the building of the fort in Laconia,

found a merchantman lying at Phea in Elis, in which the Corinthian

heavy infantry were to cross to Sicily. The ship he destroyed, but the

men escaped, and subsequently got another in which they pursued

their voyage. After this, arriving at Zacynthus and Cephallenia, he

took a body of heavy infantry on board, and sending for some of the

Messenians from Naupactus, crossed over to the opposite coast of

Acarnania, to Alyzia, and to Anactorium which was held by the

Athenians. While he was in these parts he was met by Eurymedon

returning from Sicily, where he had been sent, as has been

mentioned, during the winter, with the money for the army, who told

him the news, and also that he had heard, while at sea, that the

Syracusans had taken Plemmyrium. Here, also, Conon came to them, the

commander at Naupactus, with news that the twenty-five Corinthian

ships stationed opposite to him, far from giving over the war, were

meditating an engagement; and he therefore begged them to send him

some ships, as his own eighteen were not a match for the enemy’s

twenty-five. Demosthenes and Eurymedon, accordingly, sent ten of their

best sailers with Conon to reinforce the squadron at Naupactus, and

meanwhile prepared for the muster of their forces; Eurymedon, who

was now the colleague of Demosthenes, and had turned back in

consequence of his appointment, sailing to Corcyra to tell them to man

fifteen ships and to enlist heavy infantry; while Demosthenes raised

slingers and darters from the parts about Acarnania.

 

Meanwhile the envoys, already mentioned, who had gone from

Syracuse to the cities after the capture of Plemmyrium, had

succeeded in their mission, and were about to bring the army that they

had collected, when Nicias got scent of it, and sent to the Centoripae

and Alicyaeans and other of the friendly Sicels, who held the

passes, not to let the enemy through, but to combine to prevent

their passing, there being no other way by which they could even

attempt it, as the Agrigentines would not give them a passage

through their country. Agreeably to this request the Sicels laid a

triple ambuscade for the Siceliots upon their march, and attacking

them suddenly, while off their guard, killed about eight hundred of

them and all the envoys, the Corinthian only excepted, by whom fifteen

hundred who escaped were conducted to Syracuse.

 

About the same time the Camarinaeans also came to the assistance

of Syracuse with five hundred heavy infantry, three hundred darters,

and as many archers, while the Geloans sent crews for five ships, four

hundred darters, and two hundred horse. Indeed almost the whole of

Sicily, except the Agrigentines, who were neutral, now ceased merely

to watch events as it had hitherto done, and actively joined

Syracuse against the Athenians.

 

While the Syracusans after the Sicel disaster put off any

immediate attack upon the Athenians, Demosthenes and Eurymedon,

whose forces from Corcyra and the continent were now ready, crossed

the Ionian Gulf with all their armament to the Iapygian promontory,

and starting from thence touched at the Choerades Isles lying off

Iapygia, where they took on board a hundred and fifty Iapygian darters

of the Messapian tribe, and after renewing an old friendship with

Artas the chief, who had furnished them with the darters, arrived at

Metapontium in Italy. Here they persuaded their allies the

Metapontines to send with them three hundred darters and two

galleys, and with this reinforcement coasted on to Thurii, where

they found the party hostile to Athens recently expelled by a

revolution, and accordingly remained there to muster and review the

whole army, to see if any had been left behind, and to prevail upon

the Thurians resolutely to join them in their expedition, and in the

circumstances in which they found themselves to conclude a defensive

and offensive alliance with the Athenians.

 

About the same time the Peloponnesians in the twenty-five ships

stationed opposite to the squadron at Naupactus to protect the passage

of the transports to Sicily had got ready for engaging, and manning

some additional vessels, so as