History of the Peloponnesian War

For the stream is strong, and deep, and turbid, and the islands are thick together, and mutually serve to connect the alluvium so as to prevent its being dispersed; as they lie in alternating rows, not in one line, and have no free passages for the water into the open sea. They are uninhabited, and of no great extent. [*]( Such appears to be the force of the conjunctions δὲ καί, by which the following story is introduced in connexion with the preceding account of the islands.)

There is a report which I may also mention, that when Alemaeon, son of Amphiaraus, was wandering about after the murder of his mother, Apollo directed him by an oracle to inhabit this region, by suggesting to him that he would have no release from his terrors till he should discover and inhabit a country which had not yet been seen by the sun, nor existed as land, at the time he slew his mother; since all the rest of the earth was polluted to him.

He was perplexed, they say, [by such a command]; but at length observed this alluvial deposition of the Achelous, and thought that enough might have been thrown up to support life during the long period that he had been a wanderer since killing his mother. Accordingly he settled in the parts about Aeniadae, and became powerful, and left the name to the country from his son Acarnan. Such is the account we have received respecting Alcmaeon.

The Athenians then, and Phormio, having departed from Acarnania and arrived at Naupactus, sailed home to Athens at the return of spring, taking with them such of the prisoners from the naval battles as were freemen, (who were exchanged man for man,) and the ships they had captured.

And so ended this winter, and the third year of this war of which Thucydides wrote the history.

THE following summer, as soon as the corn was ripe, the Peloponnesians and their allies invaded Attica, under the command of Archidamus, son of Zeuxidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians. There they encamped, and laid waste the land;