time when the Thirty Years' Truce was made, and also if the Spartans would leave to their own allies generally the power of settling their internal affairs after their own inclinations; and lastly, Athens was as ready now, as she had ever been, to refer the whole dispute to the judgement of arbiters approved by both the cities.

The real breach of the peace had come not from Athens but from Corinth; and the revolt of Potidaia, stirred up by Corinthians, was a formal violation of the terms of the Thirty Years' Truce. The Athenians might therefore enter on the war with a good conscience; and after the disaster at Sphakteria the Spartans were ready to admit that in the controversy which preceded the outbreak of the strife Athens was in no way to blame.

CHAPTER II.

THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR FROM THE SURPRISE OF PLATAIA TO THE CLOSE OF THE PUBLIC LIFE OF PERIKLES.

EVEN in Plataia which had now for nearly eighty years been in the closest friendship with Athens the oligarchic party was on the look-out for any means of escaping from the alliance. Such an opportunity these Plataian oligarchs now discovered in a month of festival during which even usual precautions were disregarded; and a force of about three hundred Thebans was admitted on a dark and rainy night into Plataia (431 B.C.). Roused from their slumbers to learn that an armed force was in possession of their city, and thinking that all opposition would be useless, the chief Plataian citizens accepted the terms offered to them by the invaders, and in fact renounced the alliance of Athens. But the course of the negotiation showed the scanty numbers of the assailants; and the Plataian demos set to work to barricade with waggons their narrow and crooked streets and then by piercing the internal walls of their houses to provide the means of combined action without rousing the suspicions of the Thebans. The town was wrapped in that blackest darkness which goes immediately before the dawn, when the Plataians burst upon them. The Thebans resisted stoutly, and even gained some small advantage over their enemy; but showers of stones and tiles hurled on them from the roofs by screaming

L

women and howling slaves filled them with dismay, and their want of acquaintance with the town left them like a flock of routed sheep. Meanwhile the reinforcement which was to support the assailants had been detained on the road, and they arrived before Plataia only to learn that their scheme had miscarried. Their first impulse was to seize every Plataian found without the walls; but giving them no time for deliberation, the Plataians sent a herald to warn them that if they did any mischief, the prisoners should be instantly slain, but that, in spite of their breach of the truce, their departure should be followed by the restoration of their countrymen.

On this promise, ratified, as they declared, by a solemn oath, the Thebans returned home. The Plataian version of the story was that they made no positive pact, but merely said that the prisoners should not be killed, until negotiations for a fitting settlement should have failed. The equivocation was contemptible; but the Plataians even thus stand convicted out of their own mouth. They entered into no negotiations; and no sooner had the Theban reinforcement turned their backs on the city, than every man who had been seized within it was put to death.

One messenger had been sent to Athens when the Thebans entered the town. Another had followed when the surprise. had failed and the surviving Thebans had been made prisoners. On receiving these tidings the Athenians issued orders for seizing all Boiotians found in Attica, and sent a herald to the Plataians begging them to do nothing with their prisoners until they could well consider the matter. The messenger came too late; and the Athenians, taking away all Plataians unfit for military service together with the women and children, left the town provisioned simply as a fortified post.

The die was now cast. Both sides prepared vigorously for the conflict; and on both sides it was a time of fierce excitement. The Corinthians at least had shown that they were acting from the impulse of an unreasoning fury; and at Athens a large population had grown up which knew nothing of warfare carried on at their own doors. At the outset, the Spartan alliance included all the Peloponnesian states, except the neutral Argives and Achaians. Among their allies beyond the isthmus were the Megarians, Phokians, Lokrians, Boiotians, Ambrakiots, Leukadians, and Anaktorians. The Athenians

could reckon on hearty co-operation from the Korkyraians and the Helots of Naupaktos; but Plataia was now rather a burden than a help. Their main strength lay in the great body of allies which had formed the Delian confederacy.

It had been the great effort of Perikles to induce the Athenians to adopt one settled plan, the old plan of Themistokles, of resisting the enemy by sea, and leaving him to do much as he might choose on land. By bringing within the Long Walls which joined Athens with Peiraieus and Phaleron their women, their children, and their goods, they might weary out any enemy. But in spite of all grounds for confidence it was with a heavy heart that the dwellers in the country broke up their pleasant homes. Nor was this mournful and irksome task finished, perhaps it was not far advanced, when Archidamos the Spartan king who had arrived with the Peloponnesian army as far as the isthmus made a last effort to avert war by dispatching to Athens a herald who by the advice of Perikles was sent back without an audience. Convinced that nothing further could be looked for from negotiation, Archidamos advanced to Oinoê near the little stream of Kephisos and beneath the great mass of Kithairon. This place, as being on the border, had been strongly fortified; and Archidamos spent many days before it in vain attempts to carry it by assault. At length Archidamos moved northwards, and put to the test the endurance of the Acharnians, the sturdiest and most excitable of the Athenian Demoi. They remained passive, only at the cost of a terrible struggle which taxed the influence and the powers of Perikles to the utmost. The city was in a state of fierce tumult. But his office as Strategos gave him, it seems, the power of prohibiting the assemblies of the people; and he hesitated not to avail himself of it. But the time at length came when Perikles could furnish elsewhere an outlet for the pent-up energies of his countrymen; and an Athenian fleet, having ravaged the Peloponnesian coasts, attacked the Messenian town of Methônê, which must speedily have been captured, had not Brasidas, who held a Spartan outpost in the neighbourhood, dashed through the Athenian force and with some little loss to his men thrown himself into the city. The Athenians were scattered carelessly about the place, not looking for such sudden and impetuous movement; but the promptitude now displayed

by this young officer was an earnest of military exploits such as no other Spartan general ever equalled.

The Athenians, however, were bent on doing sterner work before the summer should draw to its close. The wretched inhabitants of Aigina were cast out upon the Peloponnesian coast, to find such refuge as the Spartans might give them. This refuge some of them found in Thyrea; and thus it came to pass that the Spartans had a bitterly hostile population at the mouth of the Corinthian gulf, and the Athenians a population not less resentful on the march lands of Lakonia and Argolis.

It was now obvious that a struggle had begun which might bring either side to desperate straits before it came to an end. Hence the Athenians determined to put aside a reserve fund not to be touched before they found themselves face to face with a supreme necessity. The form under which they chose to set apart this fund of 1,000 talents in the Akropolis was a solemn sentence that any citizen asking a vote to dispose of this money for any other purpose than that of resisting a maritime attack by the enemy on the Peiraieus itself should be punished with instant death. Probably of those who passed the decree there was not a man who dreamed that a day would come when Spartan ships should be anchored, except as prizes, in the Peiraieus; and certainly none was ignorant that if anyone should at any time wish to divert the fund to other uses, he had nothing more to do than to propose the repeal of the existing Psephisma, or decree. In the meanwhile the effect of the anathema would be to mark with the strongest condemnation of the state anyone who might even dream of using the money except as a resource in the last resort for the salvation of the city.

But there were other dangers to be provided against on the Thrakian and Chalkidian shores. Perdikkas was still the enemy of Athens because Philip and Derdas were her friends; and Potidaia still held out obstinately. Hence the Athenians embraced eagerly an opportunity for securing the alliance of the powerful Odrysian chief Sitalkes.

The first year of the struggle between Athens and Sparta was now drawing towards its end. According to the usual custom in times of war the bones or ashes of the dead, placed in ten chests, one for each tribe, with one empty bier for those of the slain whose bodies could not be found, were at Athens

carried in procession to the Kerameikos, the most beautiful suburb of the city; and there the citizen chosen for the purpose addressed to the assembled throng such words of encouragement and comfort as the time and the circumstances of the mourners seemed to call for. The citizen chosen on this occasion was Perikles, who passed in rapid review the course by which the Athenians had created their empire, and the results which had been thus far achieved; and we can well understand the high-strung enthusiasm which the speaker unquestionably felt, and which most of his hearers probably shared with him. Dwelling on the real freedom and splendid privileges of Athenian citizens, he naturally insisted that if it was worth while to die for such a state, the sacrifice was altogether more costly than that of the Spartan who gave up nothing more than the dull monotony of a monastic barrack, and who knew nothing of the larger sympathies and wider aims developed by the extended empire and trade of a power like Athens. Perikles therefore might well rise to a strain of enthusiasm when, after his sketch of their political and social life, he addressed himself to those who were mourning the death of brothers and kinsfolk. These had shown themselves worthy of the men by whose efforts the fabric of Athenian empire had been reared, and had left to their survivors the task of following their example, or if age had ended their active life, a memory full of quiet and lasting consolation.

With this picture of Athens assailed by vehement enemies, and confronting them with the sober resolution arising from the consciousness of a substantially righteous cause, the history of the first year in this momentous struggle comes to an end. The narrative of the second year (B.c 430) opens with the story of disasters utterly unlooked for. The Spartan invaders had not been many days in the land when they learnt that their enemies were being smitten by a power more terrible than their own. For some time a strange disease had been stalking westward from its starting-post in Nubia or Ethiopia; and just as the summer heats were coming on, it broke out with sudden fury in the Peiraieus. In the general state of the city there was everything to feed the plague. The houses in Athens itself were filled with country folk to whom their owners had given hospitality; and in the empty spaces within the walls a vast population was crowded with no shelter beyond tents and stifling huts. The