History of the Peloponnesian War

After the treaty, and the alliance between the Lacedaemonians and Athenians, which were concluded at the end of the ten years' war, in the ephoralty of Pleistolas at Lacedaemon, and the archonship of Alcaeus at Athens, those who had acceded to them were at peace; but the Corinthians, and some of the states in the Peloponnese, were trying to alter what had been done; and another disturbance immediately arose on the part of the allies against Lacedaemon.

Moreover, the Lacedaemonians, as time went on, became suspected by the Athenians also, through not performing in some respects what had been agreed on, according to the treaty.

And though for six years and ten months they abstained from marching against each other's territory, yet out of it, during the existence of a doubtful suspension of arms, they were doing one another the greatest possible damage. Subsequently, however, they were compelled to break the treaty concluded after the ten years' war, and again proceeded to open hostilities.

And the same Thucydides the Athenian has also written the history of these transactions in order, as they severally happened, by summers and winters, until the Lacedaemonians and their allies put an end to the sovereignty of the Athenians, and took the long walls and Piraeus. To the time of that event there were spent in the war seven and twenty years in all. With regard to the intervening arrangement, if any one shall object to consider it as a state of war, he will not estimate it rightly.

For let him [*]( On this use of διήρηται, see Poppo or Bloomfield.—With regard to the τέ in this clause, it is the opinion of Göller that it refers to καὶ before εὑρήσει: but Poppo observes in opposition to this, that the imperative ἀθρείτω has a conditional force, as it frequently has in Greek, Latin, German, and French: si quis spectaverit, inveniet; and therefore that τέ has no force. Arnold and Bloomfield consider that it is answered by ἔξω τε τούτων. First of all, the treaty was in itself practically inefficient, inasmuch as its very stipulations were not all fulfilled; and then there were mutual causes of complaint with respect to other matters of which the treaty had made no mention. ) regard it as it is characterized by the facts of the case, and he will find that there is no reason for its being deemed a state of peace; since during it they neither gave nor received back all they had arranged to do; and besides this, there were offences committed on both sides, as in the case of the Mantinean and Epidaurian wars, and other instances; and the Thrace-ward allies were in no respect less at war than before; while the Boeeotians had only a truce from one ten days to another.

Including, therefore, the first war of ten years, the suspicious cessation of hostilities which followed it, and the subsequent war which succeeded to that, any one will find that the number of years was what I have mentioned, (reckoning by the great divisions of time,) with only a few days' difference; and that such as positively asserted any thing on the strength of oracles, found this the only fact which proved true.