History of the Peloponnesian War

The Peloponnesians and their confederates, with their army divided into three, marched on towards the city of the Stratians to the end that, being encamped near it, if they yielded not on parley, they might presently assault the walls.

So they went on, the Chaonians and other barbarians in the middle, the Leucadians and Anactorians and such others as were with these on the right hand, and Cnemus with the Peloponnesians and Ambraciotes on the left, each army at great distance and sometimes out of sight of one another.

The Grecians in their march kept their order and went warily on till they had gotten a convenient place to encamp in. But the Chaonians, confident of themselves and by the inhabitants of that continent accounted most warlike, had not the patience to take in any ground for a camp but carried furiously on together with the rest of the barbarians, thought to have taken the town by their clamour and to have the action ascribed only to themselves.

But they of Stratus, aware of this whilst they were yet in their way and imagining if they could overcome these thus divided from the other two armies, that the Grecians also would be the less forward to come on, placed divers ambushes not far from the city and, when the enemies approached, fell upon them both from the city and from the ambushes at once and, putting them into affright, slew many of the Chaonians upon the place;

and the rest of the barbarians, seeing these to shrink, stayed no longer but fled outright.

Neither of the Grecian armies had knowledge of this skirmish because they were gone so far before to choose (as they then thought) a commodious place to pitch in.

But when the barbarians came back upon them running, they received them and joining both camps together stirred no more for that day. And the Stratians assaulted them not, for want of the aid of the rest of the Acarnanians, but used their slings against them and troubled them much that way (for without their men of arms there was no stirring for them); and in this kind the Acarnanians are held excellent.

When night came, Cnemus withdrew his army to the river Anapus, from Stratus eighty furlongs, and fetched off the dead bodies upon truce the next day. And whereas the city Oeniadae was come in of itself, he made his retreat thither before the Acarnanians should assemble with their succours; and from thence went everyone home. And the Stratians set up a trophy of the skirmish against the barbarians.

In the meantime the fleet of Corinth and the other confederates that was to set out from the Crisaean gulf and to join with Cnemus to hinder the lower Acarnanians from aiding the upper came not at all but were compelled to fight with Phormio and those twenty Athenian galleys that kept watch at Naupactus, about the same time that the skirmish was at Stratus.