History of the Peloponnesian War

THE following summer, the truce for a year [*]( For the arguments with which Arnold establishes, as I think, this interpretation of the passage, see his Appendix. All the later German editors adopt, with little or no variety, the view of Heilmann, Böckh, and others, who suppose it to mean, that in the following summer the truce was broken, and war renewed until the time of the Pythian games. In addition to what Arnold has observed respecting the unsuitableness of the pluperfect tense to such a mode of interpretation, it may be remarked that Thucydides applies the term τὴν ἐκεχειρίαν to the year's truce in the last chapter but one of the preceding book; and therefore it is much more natural that the same armistice should be intended by the same term in this and the following chapters. It seems evident too that there is an opposition expressed by the μέν here and the δέ in the first line of the next chapter:— the one sentence stating how long the truce continued, viz. until the Pythian games, and the other, what military measure was first executed after its expiration; while the chief event which occurred during its continuance is mentioned parenthetically between the two. Nor, again, does it seem at all like the style of Thucydides to allude so cursorily, and by anticipation, to the Pythian games, as the cause which put a final stop to hostilities, and to make no subsequent mention of them at all in what would be the natural place for doing so; but to lead his readers to conclude that the proposals for peace originated solely in the difficulties of both the great belligerent powers, and their natural anxiety to be released from them; which is the sum and substance of his history from chap. 13 to 17.) continued till the Pythian games, and then ended. During the suspension of arms, the Athenians expelled the Delians from their island, thinking that they had been consecrated when in a state of impurity from some crime of ancient date; and, moreover, that this had been the deficiency in their former purification of it; in which case I have before explained that they considered themselves to have performed it rightly by taking up the coffins of the dead. The Delians found a residence at Atramyttium in Asia, given to them by Pharnaces, as each of them arrived there.