History of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides

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

Nevertheless they went to the Boeotians, and solicited them to enter into league with them and the Argives and to do as they did. And the Corinthians further desired the Boeotians to go along with them to Athens and to procure for them the like ten days' truce to that which was made between the Athenians and Boeotians presently after the making of the fifty years' peace, on the same terms as the Boeotians had it; and if the Athenians refused, then to renounce theirs and make no more truces hereafter without the Corinthians.

The Corinthians having made this request, the Boeotians willed them, touching the league with the Argives, to stay a while longer, and went with them to Athens, but obtained not the ten days' truce; the Athenians answering that if the Corinthians were confederates with the Lacedaemonians, they had a peace already.

Nevertheless the Boeotians would not relinquish their ten days' truce, though the Corinthians both required the same and affirmed that it was so before agreed on. Yet the Athenians granted the Corinthians a cessation of arms, but without solemn ratification.

The same summer the Lacedaemonians with their whole power, under the conduct of Pleistonanax, the son of Pausanias, king of the Lacedaemonians, made war upon the Parrhasians of Arcadia, subjects of the Mantineans, partly as called in by occasion of sedition and partly because they intended, if they could, to demolish a fortification which the Mantineans had built and kept with a garrison in Cypsela, in the territory of the Parrhasians towards Sciritis of Laconia.

The Lacedaemonians therefore wasted the territory of the Parrhasians. And the Mantineans, leaving their own city to the custody of the Argives, came forth to aid the Parrhasians their confederates; but being unable to defend both the fort of Cypsela and the cities of the Parrhasians too, they went home again.

And the Lacedaemonians, when they had set the Parrhasians at liberty and demolished the fortification, went home likewise.

The same summer, when those soldiers which went out with Brasidas and of which Clearidas after the making of the peace had the charge were returned from the parts upon Thrace, the Lacedaemonians made a decree that those Helotes which had fought under Brasidas should receive their liberty and inhabit where they thought good. But not long after they placed them, together with such others as had been newly enfranchised, in Lepreum, a city standing in the confines between Laconia and the Eleians, with whom they were now at variance.

Fearing also lest those citizens of their own, which had been taken in the island and had delivered up their arms to the Athenians, should upon apprehension of disgrace for that calamity, if they remained capable of honours, make some innovation in the state, they disabled them [though] some of them were in office already. And their disablement was this: that they should neither bear office, nor be capable to buy and sell. Yet in time they were again restored to their former honours.