History of the Peloponnesian War

Now so long as the Peloponnesian army remained in the neighbourhood of Eleusis and the Thriasian plain, the Athenians retained hope that they would not advance nearer; for they remembered that Pleistoanax son of Pausanias, king of the Lacedaemonians, when fourteen years before this war he had invaded Attica with an army of Peloponnesians and proceeded as far as Eleusis and Thria, had advanced no farther but had gone back again. (And indeed this was the cause of his banishment from Sparta, since he was thought to have been bribed to retreat.)

But when they saw the army in the neighbourhood of Acharnae, only sixty stadia from the city, they thought the situation no longer tolerable; on the contrary, it naturally appeared to them a terrible thing when their land was being ravaged before their eyes, a sight which the younger men had never seen, or even the older men except in the Persian war; and the general opinion, especially on the part of the younger men, was that they ought to go forth and put a stop to it.

They gathered in knots and engaged in hot disputes, some urging that they should go out, others opposing this course. Oracle-mongers were chanting oracles of every import, according as each man was disposed to hear them. And the Acharnians, thinking that no insignificant portion of the Athenian people lived at Acharnae, insisted most of all upon going out, as it was their land that was being devastated. Thus in every way the city was in a state of irritation; and they were indignant against Pericles, and remembering none of his earlier warnings they abused him because, though their general, he would not lead them out, and considered him responsible for all their sufferings.