History of the Peloponnesian War

On his being conveyed to Athens, they got his despatches translated out of the Assyrian character, and read them: the substance of which, as regarded the Lacedaemonians, (though many other things were mentioned in them,) was, that the king did not understand what they would have; for though many ambassadors had come to him, no one ever made the same statement as another; if then they would but speak plainly, they might send men to him in company with this Persian.

The Athenians afterwards sent back Artaphernes in a trireme to Ephesus, and ambassadors with him; but on hearing there that king Artaxerxes, son of Xerxes, was lately dead, (for it was at that time that he died,) they returned home.

The same winter also the Chians dismantled their new fortifications, at the command of the Athenians, and in consequence of their suspecting that they would form some new designs against them: they obtained, however, pledges from the Athenians, and security (as far as they could) for their making no change in their treatment of them. And so the winter ended and the seventh year of this war, of which Thucydides wrote the history.

At the very commencement of the following summer, there was an eclipse of the sun at the time of a new moon, and in the early part of the same month an earthquake.

Moreover, the exiles of the the Mytilenaeans and the other Lesbians, setting out most of them from the continent, and having taken into their pay an auxiliary force from the Peloponnese, and raised troops from the neighbourhood, took Rhoeteum, but restored it without injury on the receipt of 2000 Phocaean staters.

After this they marched against Antandrus, and took the town through the treachery of the inhabitants. And their design was to liberate both the other [*]( i. e. situated on the ἀκτὴ, or coast, of Asia opposite to Lesbos.) Actaean towns, as they were called—which the Athenians held, though formerly the Mytilenaeans owned them—and, above all, Antandrus; having fortified which, (for there were great facilities for building ships there, as there was a supply of timber, with Ida close at hand,) and sallying from it, as they easily might, with resources of every other kind, they purposed to ravage Lesbos, which lay near, and to subdue the Aeolian towns on the mainland. Such were the preparations which they meant to make.