History of the Peloponnesian War

In the beginning of the winter the Athenians sent twenty galleys about Peloponnesus under the command of Phormio, who, coming to lie at Naupactus, guarded the passage that none might go in or out from Corinth and the Crisaean gulf. And other six galleys under the conduct of Melesander they sent into Caria and Lycia, as well to gather tribute in those parts as also to hinder the Peloponnesian pirates lying on those coasts from molesting the navigation of such merchant ships as they expected to come to them from Phaselis, Phoenicia, and that part of the continent.

But Melesander, landing in Lycia with such forces of the Athenians and their confederates as he had aboard, was overcome in battle and slain with the loss of a part of his army.

The same winter, the Potidaeans, unable any longer to endure the siege, seeing the invasion of Attica by the Peloponnesians could not make them rise and seeing their victual failed and that they were forced, amongst divers other things done by them for necessity of food, to eat one another, propounded at length to 70enophon the son of Euripides, Hestiodorus the son of Aristocleidas, and Phanomachus the son of Callimachus, the Athenian commanders that lay before the city, to give the same into their hands.

And they, seeing both that the army was already afflicted by lying in that cold place and that the state had already spent two thousand talents upon the siege, accepted of it. The conditions agreed on were these:

to depart, they and their wives and children and their auxiliary soldiers, every man with one suit of clothes and every woman with two, and to take with them everyone a certain sum of money for his charges by the way. Hereupon a truce was granted them to depart;

and they went, some to the Chalcideans and others to other places as they could get to. But the people of Athens called the commanders in question for compounding without them, conceiving that they might have gotten the city to discretion, and sent afterwards a colony to Potidaea of their own citizens. These were the things done in this winter. And so ended the second year of this war, written by Thucydides.

The next summer, the Peloponnesians and their confederates came not into Attica but turned their arms against Plataea, led by Archidamus the son of Zeuxidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians, who, having pitched his camp, was about to waste the territory thereof. But the Plataeans sent ambassadors presently unto him with words to this effect:

Archidamus, and you Lacedaemonians, you do neither justly nor worthy yourselves and ancestors in making war upon Plataea. For Pausanias of Lacedaemon, the son of Cleombrotus, having, together with such Grecians as were content to undergo the danger of the battle that was fought in this our territory, delivered all Greece from the slavery of the Persians, when he offered sacrifice in the market-place of Plataea to Jupiter the deliverer, called together all the confederates and granted to the Plataeans this privilege: that their city and territory should be free; that none should make any unjust war against them nor go about to subject them; and if any did, the confederates then present should to their utmost ability revenge their quarrel.

These privileges your fathers granted us for our valour and zeal in those dangers. But now do you the clean contrary; for you join with our greatest enemies, the Thebans, to bring us into subjection.