Having thus gained their point, the delegates returned home at once; the Athenian envoys a little later, when they had despatched the objects of their mission.

This decision of the assembly judging that the treaty had been broken, was made in the fourteenth year of the thirty years' truce, which was entered into after the affair of Euboea.

The Lacedaemonians voted that the treaty had been broken, and that war must be declared, not so much because they were persuaded by the arguments of the allies, as because they feared the growth of the power of the Athenians, seeing most of Hellas already subject to them.

The way in which Athens came to be placed in the circumstances under which her power grew was this.