History of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides

Thucydides. The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Hobbes, Thomas. translator. London: John Bohn, 1843.

Presently after this, the same summer, the Athenians, with eighty galleys, two thousand men of arms of their own city, and two hundred horse in boats built for transportation of horses, made war upon the territory of Corinth. There went also with them Milesians, Andrians, and Carystians, of their confederates. The general of the whole army was Nicias, the son of Niceratus, with two others in commission with him.

Betimes in a morning they put in at a place between Chersonesus and Rheitus on that shore above which standeth the hill Solygeius, whereon the Dorians in old time sat down to make war on the Corinthians in the city of Corinth, that were then Aeolians, and upon which there standeth now a village, called also Solygeia. From the shore where the galleys came in, this village is distant twenty furlongs, and the city of Corinth sixty, and the isthmus twenty.

The Corinthians, having long before from Argos had intelligence that an army of the Athenians was coming against them, came all of them with their forces to the isthmus, save only such as dwelt without the isthmus and five hundred garrison soldiers absent in Ambracia and Leucadia; all the rest of military age came forth to attend the Athenians where they should put in.

But when the Athenians had put to shore in the night unseen and that advertisement thereof was given them by signs put up into the air, they left the one half of their forces in Cenchreia lest the Athenians should go against Crommyon: and with the other half made haste to meet them.