History of the Peloponnesian War

“For the Lacedaemonians the following persons took the oath: Pleistoanax, Agis, Pleistolas, Damagetus, Chionis, Metagenes, Acanthus, Daïthus, Ischagoras, Philocharidas, Zeuxidas, Antippus, Alcinadas, Tellis, Empedias, Menas, Laphilus; for the Athenians, Lampon, Isthmionicus, Laches, Nicias, Euthydemus, Procles, Pythodorus, Hagnon, Myrtilus, Thrasycles, Theagenes, Aristocrates, Iolcius, Timocrates, Leon, Lamachus, Demosthenes.” This alliance was made not long after the treaty, and the Athenians restored to the Lacedaemonians the captives taken on the island;

and thus began the summer of the eleventh year. During these ten years the first war, of which the history has now been written, was waged continuously.

After the treaty and the alliance between the Lacedaemonians and Athenians, which were concluded at the end of the ten years' war, in the ephorate of Pleistolas at Lacedaemon and the archonship of Alcaeus at Athens, those who accepted these were at peace; but the Corinthians and some of the cities in the Peloponnesus attempted to disturb the agreements, and at once other trouble also began between Lacedaemon and her allies.

At the same time, too, the Lacedaemonians, as time went on, incurred the suspicion of the Athenians, by not acting in some matters in accordance with the articles of the agreement.

For six years and ten months the two powers abstained from invading each other's territory; in other regions, however, there was only an unstable cessation of arms and they kept on doing each other the greatest possible damage. But at last they were forced to break the treaty which had been concluded after the first ten years, and again engaged in open war.

[*](This chapter forms a kind of second introduction, and was probably written after the author enlarged his plan from a history of the first ten years to that of the whole war.) The history of these events, also, has been written by the same Thucydides, an Athenian, in the chronological order of events, by summers and winters, up to the time when the Lacedaemonians and their allies put an end to the dominion of the Athenians and took the Long Walls and Peiraeus.[*](According to Plutarch, Lysander 15, this took place in April 404.) Up to that event the war lasted twenty-seven years in all;