History of the Peloponnesian War

The Athenians, when this city was peopled, were at first afraid and thought it to be set up especially against Euboea; because from thence to Cenaeum, a promontory of Euboea, the passage is but short. But it fell out afterwards otherwise than they imagined; for they had no great harm by it, the reason whereof was this.

That the Thessalians, who had the towns of those parts in their power and upon whose ground it was built, afflicted these new planters with a continual war till they had worn them out, though they were many indeed in the beginning. For being the foundation of the Lacedaemonians, everyone went thither boldly, conceiving the city to be an assured one. And chiefly the governors themselves, sent hither from Lacedaemon, undid the business and dispeopled the city by fighting most men away, for that they governed severely and sometimes also unjustly, by which means their neighbours more easily prevailed against them.

The same summer, and about the same time that the Athenians stayed in Melos, those other Athenians that were in the thirty galleys about Peloponnesus slew first certain garrison soldiers in Ellomenus, a place of Leucadia, by ambush. But afterwards with a greater fleet and with the whole power of the Acarnanians, who followed the army, all (but the Oeniades) that could bear arms, and with the Zacynthians and Cephalonians and fifteen galleys of the Corcyraeans, made war against the city itself of Leucas.

The Leucadians, though they saw their territory wasted by them both without the isthmus and within where the city of Leucas standeth and the temple of Apollo, yet they durst not stir because the number of the enemy was so great. And the Acarnanians entreated Demosthenes, the Athenian general, to wall them up, conceiving that they might easily be expugned by a siege and desiring to be rid of a city their continual enemy.

But Demosthenes was persuaded at the same time by the Messenians that, seeing so great an army was together, it would be honourable for him to invade the Aetolians, principally as being enemies to Naupactus; and that if these were subdued, the rest of the continent thereabouts would easily be added to the Athenian dominion.

For they alleged that though the nation of the Aetolians were great and warlike, yet their habitation was in villages unwalled and those at great distances, and were but light-armed and might, therefore, with no great difficulty be all subdued before they could unite themselves for defense.