History of the Peloponnesian War

The following winter, the Lacedaemonians intended to march against the Argive territory, but returned on finding, when at the frontier, that the sacrifices for crossing it were not favourable. Owing to this intention on their part, the Argives, suspecting a certain party in their city, seized some of them, while others escaped them.

About the same time, the Melians again took a part of the Athenian lines in another direction, the garrison not being numerous.

A fresh force having afterwards come from Athens in consequence of these occurrences, under the command of Philocrates son of Demeas, and the inhabitants being now vigorously blockaded, after there had also been some treachery practised by their own men, they surrendered at discretion to the Athenians;

who put to death all the Melian adults they took, and made slaves of the children and women. As for the country, they afterwards sent out five hundred colonists, and inhabited it themselves.

THE same winter the Athenians wished to sail again to Sicily, with a larger armament than that under Laches and Eurymedon, and bring it into subjection to them, if they could; the mass of the people being ignorant of the size of the island, and the number of its inhabitants, both Greeks and barbarians; and that they were undertaking a war not much inferior in magnitude to that with the Peloponnesians.

For the voyage round Sicily in a merchant vessel is one of not much less than eight days; and [*]( The reasoning employed in the words τοσαύτη οὖσα is very much in the style of the geography of Herodotus. The notion is, that so large an island ought to have been in the midst of a wide sea, proportioned to its own magnitude; and not to have been so close upon the coast, as to seem a sort of appendage to the mainland, —Arnold.) though it is of such extent, it is only excluded by the space of about twenty stades of sea from being mainland.