History of the Peloponnesian War

and afterwards prepared to send a fleet to Lesbos, and intimated to the cities rateably to furnish forty galleys, and appointed Alcidas, who was to go thither with them, for admiral.

And the Athenians, when they saw the Peloponnesians gone, went likewise home with their hundred galleys.

About the time that this fleet was out, they had surely the most galleys (besides the beauty of them) together in action in these employment; yet in the beginning of the war they had both as good and more in number.

For a hundred attended the guard of Attica, Euboea, and Salamis; and another hundred were about Peloponnesus, besides those that were at Potidaea and other places, so that in one summer they had in all two hundred and fifty sail.

And this, together with Potidaea, was it that most exhausted their treasure.

For the men of arms that besieged the city had each of them two drachmes a day, one for himself and another for his man, and were three thousand in number that were sent thither at first and remained to the end of the siege, besides sixteen hundred more that went with Phormio and came away before the town was won. And the galleys had all the same pay. In this manner was their money consumed and so many galleys employed, the most indeed that ever they had manned at once.

About the same time that the Lacedaemonians were in the isthmus, the Mytilenaeans marched by land, both they and their auxiliaries, against Methymne in hope to have had it betrayed unto them and, having assaulted the city, when it succeeded not the way they looked for, they went thence to Antissa, Pyrrha, and Eressus; and after they had settled the affairs of those places and made strong their walls returned speedily home.

When these were gone, the Methymnaeans likewise made war upon Antissa; but beaten by the Antisaeans and some auxiliaries that were with them, they made haste again to Methymne with the loss of many of their soldiers.