History of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides

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

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.

The same summer also the Dictideans took Thyssus, a town in Mount Athos, and confederate of the Athenians.

This whole summer there was continual commerce between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians; nevertheless they began, both the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians, to have each other in suspicion immediately after the peace, in respect of the places not yet mutually surrendered.