History of the Peloponnesian War

After this the Lacedaemonians (for the conferences between the Athenians and Lacedaemonians about reciprocal restitution continued still), hoping that if the Athenians should obtain from the Boeotians Panactum, that then they also should recover Pylus, sent ambassadors to the Boeotians with request that Panactum and the Athenian prisoners might be put into the hands of the Lacedaemonians, that they might get Pylus restored in exchange.

But the Boeotians answered that unless the Lacedaemonians would make a particular league with them as they had done with the Athenians, they would not do it. The Lacedaemonians, though they knew they should therein wrong the Athenians, for that it was said in the articles that neither party should make either league or war without the other's consent, yet such was their desire to get Panactum to exchange it for Pylus, and withal they that longed to break the peace with Athens were so eager in it, that at last they concluded a league with the Boeotians, winter then ending and the spring approaching; and Panactum was presently pulled down to the ground. So ended the eleventh year of this war.

In the spring following, the Argives, when they saw that the ambassadors which the Boeotians promised to send unto them came not, and that Panactum was razed, and that also there was a private league made between the Boeotians and the Lacedaemonians, were afraid lest they should on all hands be abandoned, and that the confederates would all go to the Lacedaemonians.

For they apprehended that the Boeotians had been induced both to raze Panactum and also to enter into the Athenian peace by the Lacedaemonians; and that the Athenians were privy to the same, so that now they had no means to make league with the Athenians neither; whereas before they made account that if their truce with the Lacedaemonians continued not, they might upon these differences have joined themselves to the Athenians.

The Argives being therefore at a stand and fearing to have war all at once with the Lacedaemonians, Tegeats, Boeotians, and Athenians, [as] having formerly refused the truce with the Lacedaemonians and imagined to themselves the principality of all Peloponnesus, they sent ambassadors with as much speed as might be, Eustrophus and Aeson, persons as they thought most acceptable unto them, with this cogitation, that by compounding with the Lacedaemonians as well as for their present estate they might, howsoever the world went, they should at least live at quiet.