History of the Peloponnesian War

For at that time, most of the affairs of the commonweal were administered by those nine archontes.

Now those that were besieged with Cylon were for want of both victual and water in very evil estate, and therefore Cylon and a brother of his fled privily out;

but the rest, when they were pressed and some of them dead with famine, sat down as suppliants by the altar that is in the citadel. And the Athenians, to whose charge was committed the guard of the place, raising them upon promise to do them no harm, put them all to the sword. Also they had put to death some of those that had taken sanctuary at the altars of the severe goddesses as they were going away. And from this the Athenians, both themselves and their posterity, were called accursed and sacrilegious persons.

Hereupon the Athenians banished those that were under the curse; and Cleomenes, a Lacedaemonian, together with the Athenians in a sedition, banished them afterwards again, and not only so but disinterred and cast forth the bodies of such of them as were dead. Nevertheless there returned of them afterwards again, and there are of their race in the city unto this day.

This pollution, therefore, the Lacedaemonians required them to purge their city of, principally, forsooth, as taking part with the gods, but knowing withal that Pericles the son of 127antippus was by the mother's side one of that race. For they thought if Pericles were banished, the Athenians would the more easily be brought to yield to their desire.

Nevertheless, they hoped not so much that he should be banished as to bring him into the envy of the city, as if the misfortune of him were in part the cause of the war.

For being the most powerful of his time and having the sway of the state, he was in all things opposite to the Lacedaemonians, not suffering the Athenians to give them the least way but inciting them to the war.