History of the Peloponnesian War

They also arranged for the defence of Pylus; and the Messenians of Naupactus sent to the place, as to the land of their fathers, (for Pylus is a part of what was formerly the Messenian country,) such of their men as were most fit for the service, and plundered Laconia, and annoyed them most seriously by means of their common dialect.

The Lacedaemonians having had no experience aforetime in such a predatory kind of warfare, and finding their Helots deserting, and fearing that they might see their country revolutionized to even a still greater extent, were not easy under it; but, although unwilling to show this to the Athenians, they sent ambassadors to them, and endeavoured to recover Pylus and the men.

They, however, were grasping at greater advantages, and though they often went to them, sent them back without effecting any thing. These then were the things that happened about Pylus.

The same summer, immediately after these events, the Athenians made an expedition against the Corinthian territory with eighty ships, two thousand heavy-armed of their own people, and two hundred cavalry on board horse-transports; the Milesians, Andrians, and Carystians, from amongst the allies, accompanying them, and Nicias the son of Niceratus taking the command, with two colleagues.

Setting sail, they made land in the morning between [*]( i. e. the peninsula and the stream; the former running out into the sea, from the ridge of Mount Oneum. See the sketch of the coast in Arnold, vol. ii.) the Chersonesus and Rheitus, on the beach adjoining to the spot above which is the Solygian hill, on which the Dorians in early times established themselves, and carried on war against the Corinthians in the city, who were Aeolians; and on which there now stands a village called Solygia. From this beach, where the ships came to land, the village is twelve stades off, the city of Corinth sixty, and the Isthmus twenty.

The Corinthians, having heard long before from Argos that the armament of the Athenians was coming, went with succours to the Isthmus, all but those who lived above it: there were absent too in Ambracia and Leucadia five hundred of them, serving as a garrison; but the rest, with all their forces, were watching where the Athenians would make the land.