History of the Peloponnesian 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;

and if anyone shall not deem it proper to include the intervening truce in the war, he will not judge aright. For let him but look at the question in the light of the facts as they have been set forth[*](Or, taking ἡ διὰ μέσου μέσου ξ)ύμβασις as subject of διῄρηται “For if he will but observe how the truce was interrupted by actual military operations”) and he will find that that can not fitly be judged a state of peace in which neither party restored or received all that had been agreed upon. And, apart from that, there were violations of the treaty on both sides in the Mantinean and Epidaurian wars,[*](For these wars, see chs. xxxiii. f. and liii. f.) as well as in other matters; the allies in Thrace, too, were no less hostile to Athens than before, and the Boeotians observed a truce which had to be renewed every ten days.

So that, including the first ten-years' war, the suspicious truce succeeding that, and the war which followed the truce, one will find that, reckoning according to natural seasons, there were just so many years as I have stated, and some few days over. He will also find, in the case of those who have made any assertion in reliance upon oracles, that this fact alone proved true;

for always, as I remember, from the beginning of the war until its close, it was said by many that it was fated to last thrice nine years.

I lived through the whole war, being of an age to form judgments, and followed it with close attention, so as to acquire accurate information. It befell me also to be banished from my own country for twenty years after my command at Amphipolis,[*](cf. 4.104.4.) and being conversant with affairs on both sides, especially with those of the Peloponnesians by reason of my banishment, to gain at my leisure a better acquaintance with the course of events.

The difference, then, which arose after the ten years, and the breaking of the truce and the subsequent hostilities, I will now proceed to relate.