History of the Peloponnesian War

The next winter the Lacedaemonians, understanding that they were fortifying, came to Argos with their army, they and their confederates all but the Corinthians; and some practice they had beside within the city itself of Argos. The army was commanded by Agis, the son of Archidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians.

But those things which were practising in Argos and supposed to have been already mature did not then succeed. Nevertheless they took the walls that were then in building and razed them to the ground; and then, after they had taken Hysiae, a town in the Argive territory, and slain all the freemen in it, they went home and were dissolved every one to his own city.

After this, the Argives went with an army into Phliasia, which when they had wasted, they went back. They did it because the men of Phlius had received their outlaws; for there the greatest part of them dwelt.

The same winter the Athenians shut up Perdiccas in Macedonia [from the use of the sea], objecting that he had sworn the league of the Argives and Lacedaemonians; and that when they had prepared an army, under the command of Nicias, the son of Niceratus, to go against the Chalcideans upon Thrace and against Amphipolis, he had broken the league made betwixt them and him, and by his departure was the principal cause of the dissolution of that army, and was therefore an enemy. And so this winter ended, and the fifteenth year of this war.

The next summer went Alcibiades to Argos with twenty galleys and took thence the suspected Argives and such as seemed to savour of the Lacedaemonian faction, to the number of three hundred, and put them into the nearest of the islands subject to the Athenian state. The Athenians made war also against the isle of Melos, with thirty galleys of their own, six of Chios, and two of Lesbos. Wherein were of their own twelve hundred men of arms, three hundred archers, and twenty archers on horseback; and of their confederates and islanders, about fifteen hundred men of arms.

The Melians are a colony of the Lacedaemonians, and therefore refused to be subject, as the rest of the islands were, unto the Athenians, but rested at the first neutral; and afterwards, when the Athenians put them to it by wasting of their land, they entered into open war.