All this while great attention was being given to the war; the allies were being mustered, and an armament of a hundred ships equipped for Peloponnese.

Such was the state of preparation at Athens.

Meanwhile the army of the Peloponnesians was advancing. The first town they came to in Attica was Oenoe, where they were to enter the country. Sitting down before it, they prepared to assault the wall with engines and otherwise.

Oenoe, standing upon the Athenian and Boeotian border, was of course a walled town, and was used as a fortress by the Athenians in time of war. So the Peloponnesians prepared for their assault, and wasted some valuable time before the place.

This delay brought the gravest censure upon Archidamus. Even during the levying of the war he had gained credit for weakness and Athenian sympathies by the half measures he had advocated; and after the army had assembled he had further injured himself in public estimation by his loitering at the Isthmus and the slowness with which the rest of the march had been conducted. But all this was as nothing to the delay at Oenoe.