History of the Peloponnesian War

and getting to the hill Thiamus, which is a desert hill, they marched over it and came down into Argeia when it was now night; and passing between the city of the Argives and the Arcarnanians that kept watch at [the] Wells, came unseen and joined with the Ambraciotes at Olpae.

When they were all together, they sat down about break of day at a place called Metropolis and there encamped. And the Athenians not long after with their twenty galleys arrived in the Ambracian gulf to the aid of the Argives, to whom also came Demosthenes with two hundred Messenian men of arms and threescore Athenian archers.

The galleys lay at sea before the hill upon which the fort of Olpae standeth. But the Acarnanians, and those few Amphilochians (for the greatest part of them the Ambraciotes kept back by force) that were come already together at Argos, prepared themselves to give the enemy battle, and chose Demosthenes, with their own commanders, for general of the whole league. He, when he had brought them up near unto Olpae, there encamped.

There was between them a great hollow. And for five days together they stirred not; but the sixth day both sides put themselves into array for the battle. The army of the Peloponnesians reached a great way beyond the other, for indeed it was much greater; but Demosthenes, fearing to be encompassed, placed an ambush in a certain hollow way and fit for such a purpose, of armed and unarmed soldiers, in all to the number of four hundred; which, in that part where the number of the enemies overreached, should in the heat of the battle rise out of ambush and charge them on their backs.

When the battles were in order on either side, they came to blows. Demosthenes, with the Messenians and those few Athenians that were there, stood in the right wing; and the Acarnanians (as they could one after another be put in order) and those Amphilochian darters which were present, made up the other. The Peloponnesians and Ambraciotes were ranged promiscuously, except only the Mantineans, who stood together most of them in the left wing, but not in the utmost part of it; for Eurylochus and those that were with him made the extremity of the left wing, against Demosthenes and the Messenians.

When they were in fight, and that the Peloponnesians with that wing overreached and had encircled the right wing of their enemies, those Acarnanians that lay in ambush, coming in at their backs, charged them and put them to flight in such sort as they endured not the first brunt, and besides, caused the greatest part of the army through affright to run away. For when they saw that part of it defeated which was with Eurylochus, which was the best of their army, they were a great deal the more afraid. And the Messenians that were in that part of the army with Demosthenes, pursuing them, dispatched the greatest part of the execution.