When the Lacedaemonians saw things so contrary to their expectation, they thought it false which was spoken by the Lesbian ambassadors, and esteeming the action difficult, seeing their confederates were not arrived and that news was brought of the wasting of the territory near their city by the thirty galleys formerly sent about Peloponnesus by the Athenians, went home again,

and afterwards prepared to send a fleet to Lesbos, and intimated to the cities rateably to furnish forty galleys, and appointed Alcidas, who was to go thither with them, for admiral.