Kitap 4
Thereupon Cleon attacked them violently, saying that he had known before this that they had no honourable intention, and now it was clear, since they were unwilling to speak out before the people, but wished to meet a few men in conference; he bade them, on the contrary, if their purpose was honest, to declare it there before them all.
But the Lacedaemonians, seeing that it was impossible to announce in full assembly such concessions as they might think it best to make in view of their misfortune, lest they might be discredited with their allies if they proposed them and were rebuffed, and seeing also that the Athenians would not grant their proposals on tolerable conditions, withdrew from Athens, their mission a failure.
When they returned, the truce at Pylos was terminated at once, and the Lacedaemonians demanded the return of their ships according to the agreement; but the Athenians accused them of having made a raid against the fort in violation of the truce, and of other acts that do not seem worth mentioning, and refused to give up the ships, stoutly maintaining that it had been stipulated that, if there should be any violation of the truce whatsoever, it should be at an endforthwith. The Lacedaemonians contradicted this, and after protesting that the detention of the ships was an act of injustice went away and renewed the war.
And so the warfare at Pylos was carried on vigorously by both sides. The Athenians kept sailing round the island by day with two ships going in opposite directions, and at night their whole fleet lay at anchor on all sides of it, except to seaward when there was a wind; while to assist them in the blockade twenty additional ships came from Athens, so that they now had seventy in all. As for the Peloponnesians, they were encamped on the mainland, and kept making assaults upon the fort, watching for any opportunity which might offer of rescuing their men.
Meanwhile in Sicily the Syracusans and their allies, having reinforced the ships which were keeping guard at Messene by bringing up the other naval force which they had been equipping,cf. 4.1.4. were carrying on the war from Messene.
To this they were instigated chiefly by the Locrians on account of their hatred of the Rhegians, whose territory they had themselves invaded in full force.
The Syracusans wanted also to try their fortune in a sea-fight, seeing that the Athenians had only a few ships at hand, and hearing that the most of their fleet, the ships that were on the way to Sicily, were employed in blockading the island of Sphacteria.
For, in case they won a victory with the fleet, they could then invest Rhegium both by land and by sea and, as they believed, capture it without difficulty; and from that moment their situation would be a strong one, since Rhegium, the extreme point of Italy, and Messene in Sicily are only a short distance apart, and so the Athenians would not be able to keep a fleet thereie. in case Rhegium were taken by the Syracusans. and command the strait.
Now the strait is that arm of the sea between Rhegium and Messene, at the point where Sicily is nearest the mainland; and it is the Charybdis, so called, through which Odysseus is said to have sailed. On account of its narrowness and because the water falls into it from two great seas, the Etruscan and the Sicilian, and is full of currents, it has naturally been considered dangerous.
Now it was in this strait that the Syracusans and their allieswere compelled one day toward evening to fight for a vessel which was making the passage; and with thirty odd ships they put out against sixteen Athenian and eight Rhegian ships.
They were defeated by the Athenians, and hastily sailed back, each contingent as best it could, to their own camps, having lost one ship; and night came on while they were in action. After this the Locrians left the territory of the Rhegians;
and the ships of the Syracusans and their allies assembled at Peloris in Messene, where they anchored and were joined by their land-forces. The Athenians and the Rhegians sailed up, and seeing that the Syracusan ships were unmanned attacked them;
but they themselves lost one ship, which was caught by a grappling-iron cast upon it, the crew having leaped overboard.
After this the Syracusans embarked and their ships were being towed along the shore by ropes toward Messene when the Athenians attacked again, but lost another ship, since the Syracusans made a sudden turn outwards and charged them first.
In the passage along the shore, then, and in the sea-fight that followed in this unusual fashion, the Syracusans had the best of it, and at length gained the harbour at Messene. But the Athenians, on the report that Camarina was to be betrayed to the Syracusans by Archias and his faction, sailed thither.
The Messenians meanwhile took all their land-forces and also the allied fleet and made an expedition against Naxos, the Chalcidian settlement on their borders.
On the first day they confined the Naxians within their walls and ravaged their lands; on the next day, while their fleet sailed round to the river Acesines and ravaged the land there, their army assaulted the city of Naxos.
Meanwhile the Sicels came down over the heights in large numbers to help in resisting the Messenians. When the Naxians saw them coming, they took heart, and calling to each other that the Leontines and their other Hellenic allies were approaching to defend them rushed suddenly out of the city and fell upon the Messenians, putting them to flight and killing over a thousand of them. The rest got back home with difficulty; for the barbarians attacked them in the roads and killed most of them. And the allied fleet, after putting in at Messene, dispersed to their several homes.
Thereupon the Leontines and their allies, in company with the Athenians, immediately made an expedition against Messene, believing it to be weakened, and attempted an assault upon it, the Athenians attacking with their ships on the side of the harbour, while the land forces moved against the town.
But the Messenians and some of the Locrians, who, under the command of Demoteles, had been left there as a garrison after the disaster at Naxos, made a sortie, and falling suddenly upon them routed the larger part of the army of the Leontines and killed many of them. Seeing this the Athenians disembarked and came to their aid, and attacking the Messenians while they were in disorder pursued them back into the city; they then set up a trophy and withdrew to Rhegium.
After this the Hellenes in Sicily, without the cooperation of the Athenians, continued to make expeditions against one another by land.
At Pylos, meanwhile, the Athenians were still besieging the Lacedaemonians on the island, and the army of the Peloponnesians on the mainland remained in its former position. The blockade, however, was harassing to the Athenians on account of the lack of both food and water;
for there was only one spring, high up on the acropolis of Pylos, and a small one at that, and the soldiers for the most part scraped away the shingle upon the beach and drank water such as one might expect to find there.
And there was scant room for them, encamping as they did in a small space, and since there was no anchorage for the ships,The reference is to the ships which kept up a patrol round the island. There was no anchorage near the shore on the seaward side (4.8.8), so at meal-times the crews of one part of the fleet would make a landing somewhere and eat, while the other part would be out at sea on guard. the crews would take their food on land by turns, while the rest of the fleet lay at anchor out at sea.
Very great discouragement, too, was caused by the surprisingly long duration of the siege, whereas they had expected to reduce the enemy in a few days, since they were on a desert island and had only brackish water to drink.
But the cause of their holding out was that the Lacedaemonians had called for volunteers to convey to the island ground corn and wine and cheese and other food such as might be serviceable in a siege, fixing a high price and also promising freedom to any Helot who should get food in. Many took the risk, especially the Helots, and actually brought it in, putting out from any and every point in the Peloponnesus and coming to shore during the night on the side of the island facing the sea.
If possible they waited for a wind to bear them to the shore;
for they found it easier to elude the guard of triremes when the breeze was from the sea, since then it was impossible for the ships to lie at their moorings off the island, whereas they themselves ran ashore regardless of consequences, as a value had been set upon the boats which they drove upon the beach, and the hoplites would be on watch for them at the landing-places on the island. All, on the other hand, who made the venture in calm weather were captured.
At the harbour, too, there were divers who swam to the island under water, towing after them by a cord skins filled with poppy-seed mixed with honey and bruised linseed; at first they were not discovered, but afterwards watches were set for them.
And so both sides kept resorting to every device, the one to get food in, the other to catch them doing it.
At Athens, meanwhile, when they heard that their army was in distress and that food was being brought in to the men on the island, they were perplexed and became apprehensive that the winter would overtake them while still engaged in the blockade. They saw that conveyance of supplies round the Peloponnesus would be impossible—Pylos being a desolate place at best, to which they were unable even in summer to send round adequate supplies—and that, since there were no harbours in the neighbourhood, the blockade would be a failure. Either their own troops would relax their watch and the men on the island would escape, or else, waiting for bad weather, they would sail away in the boats which brought them food.
Above all they were alarmed about the attitude of the Lacedaemonians, thinking that it was because they had some ground for confidence that they were no longer making overtures to them; and they repented having rejected their proposals for peace.
But Cleon, knowing that their suspicions were directed against him because he had prevented the agreement, said that the messengers who had come from Pylos were not telling the truth. Whereupon these messengers advised, if their own reports were not believed, that commissioners be sent to see for themselves, and Cleon himself was chosen by the Athenians, with Theagenes as his colleague.
Realizing now that he would either be obliged to bring the same report as the messengers whose word he was impugning, or, if he contradicted them, be convicted of falsehood, and also seeing that the Athenians were now somewhat more inclined to send an expedition, he told them that they ought not to send commissioners, or by dallying to let slip a favourable opportunity, but urged them, if they themselves thought the reports to be true, to send a fleet and fetch the men.
And pointing at Nicias son of Niceratus, who was one of the generals and an enemy of his, and taunting him, he said that it was an easy matter, if the generals were men, to sail there with a proper force and take the men on the island, declaring that this was what he himself would have done had he been in command.
The Athenians thereupon began to clamour against Cleon, asking him why he did not sail even now, if it seemed to him so easy a thing; and Nicias, noticing this and Cleon's taunt, told him that as far as the generals were concerned he might take whatever force he wished and make the attempt.
As for Cleon, he was at first ready to go, thinking it was only in pretence that Nicias offered to relinquish the command; but when he realized that Nicias really desired to yield the command to him, he tried to back out, saying that not he but Nicias was general; for by now he was alarmed, and never thought that Nicias would go so far as to retire in his favour.
But again Nicias urged him to go and offered to resign his command of the expedition against Pylos, calling the Athenians to witness that he did so. And the more Cleon tried to evade the expedition and to back out of his own proposal, the more insistently the Athenians, as is the way with a crowd, urged Nicias to give up the command and shouted to Cleon to sail.
And so, not knowing how he could any longer escape from his own proposal, he undertook the expedition, and, coming forward, said that he was not afraid of the Lacedaemonians, and that he would sail without taking a single Athenian soldier, but only the Lemnian and Imbrian troops which were in Athens and a body of targeteers which had come from Aenos, and four hundred archers from other places. With these, in addition to the troops now at Pylos, he said that within twenty days he would either bring back the Lacedaemonians alive or slay them on the spot.
At this vain talk of his there was a burst of laughter on the part of the Athenians, but nevertheless the sensible men among them were glad, for they reflected that they were bound to obtain one of two good things—either they would get rid of Cleon, which they preferred, or if they were disappointed in this, he would subdue the Lacedaemonians for them.