Kitap 4
The Lacedaemonians having had no experience aforetime in such a predatory kind of warfare, and finding their Helots deserting, and fearing that they might see their country revolutionized to even a still greater extent, were not easy under it; but, although unwilling to show this to the Athenians, they sent ambassadors to them, and endeavoured to recover Pylus and the men.
They, however, were grasping at greater advantages, and though they often went to them, sent them back without effecting any thing. These then were the things that happened about Pylus.
The same summer, immediately after these events, the Athenians made an expedition against the Corinthian territory with eighty ships, two thousand heavy-armed of their own people, and two hundred cavalry on board horse-transports; the Milesians, Andrians, and Carystians, from amongst the allies, accompanying them, and Nicias the son of Niceratus taking the command, with two colleagues.
Setting sail, they made land in the morning between i. e. the peninsula and the stream; the former running out into the sea, from the ridge of Mount Oneum. See the sketch of the coast in Arnold, vol. ii. the Chersonesus and Rheitus, on the beach adjoining to the spot above which is the Solygian hill, on which the Dorians in early times established themselves, and carried on war against the Corinthians in the city, who were Aeolians; and on which there now stands a village called Solygia. From this beach, where the ships came to land, the village is twelve stades off, the city of Corinth sixty, and the Isthmus twenty.
The Corinthians, having heard long before from Argos that the armament of the Athenians was coming, went with succours to the Isthmus, all but those who lived above it: there were absent too in Ambracia and Leucadia five hundred of them, serving as a garrison; but the rest, with all their forces, were watching where the Athenians would make the land.
But when they had come to during the night unobserved by them, and the appointed signals were raised to tell them of the fact, they left half their forces at Cenchreae, in case the Athenians should advance against Crommyon, and went to the rescue with all speed.
And Battus, one of the generals, (for there were two present in the engagement,) took a battalion, and went to the village of Solygia to defend it, as it was unwalled; while Lycophron gave them battle with the rest.
First, the Corinthians attacked the right wing of the Athenians, immediately after it had landed in front of Chersonesus; then the rest of their army also. And the battle was an obstinate one, and fought entirely hand to hand.
The right wing of the Athenians and Carystians (for these had been posted in the extremity of the line) received the charge of the Corinthians, and drove them back after some trouble; but after retreating to a wall (for the ground was all on a rise) they assailed them with stones from the higher ground, and singing the paean, returned to the attack; which being received by the Athenians, the battle was again fought hand to hand.
Meanwhile a battalion of the Corinthians, having gone to the relief of their left wing, broke the right of the Athenians, and pursued them to the sea; but the Athenians and Carystians from the ships drove them back again.
The rest of the army on both sides was fighting without cessation, especially the right wing of the Corinthians, in which Lycophron was opposed to the left of the Athenians, and acting on the defensive; for they expected them to try for the village of Solygia.
For a long time then they held out without yielding to each other; but afterwards (the Athenians having a serviceable force on their side in their cavalry, while the others had no horse) the Corinthians turned and retired to the hill, where they piled their arms, and did not come down again, but remained quiet.
It was in this rout of the right wing that the greater part of them fell, and Lycophron their general. The rest of the army, whose flight, when it was broken, was effected in this manner—with neither hot pursuit nor hurry—withdrew to the higher ground, and there took up its position.
The Athenians, finding that they no longer advanced to engage them, spoiled the dead, and took up their own, and immediately erected a trophy.
But to that half of the Corinthians which had been posted at Cenchreae for protection, lest the enemy should sail against Crommyon, the battle was not visible, owing to [an intervening ridge of] Mount Oneum; but when they saw dust, and were aware of it, they immediately went to the scene of action; as also did the older Corinthians from the city, when they found what had been done.
The Athenians, seeing them coming all together against them, and thinking that reinforcements were being brought by the neighbouring Peloponnesians, retreated with all speed to their ships, with the spoils and their own dead, except two whom they had left on the field because they could not find them.
Having gone on board their ships, they crossed over to the islands that lie off the coast, and from them sent a herald, and took up under truce the bodies they had left behind them. There were killed in the battle, on the side of the Corinthians, two hundred and twelve; of the Athenians, rather less than fifty.
Putting out from the islands, the Athenians sailed the same day to Crommyon in the Corinthian territory, distant from the city one hundred and twenty stades, and having come to their moorings, ravaged the land, and passed the night there.
The next day, having first coasted along to the Epidaurian territory and made a descent upon it, they came to Methone, which stands between Epidaurus and Troezen; and cutting off the isthmus of the peninsula in which Methone is situated, they fortified it, and having made it a post for a garrison, continued afterwards to lay waste the land of Troezen, Haliae, and Epidaurus. After cutting off this spot by a wall, they sailed back home with their ships.
At the same time that these things were being done, Eurymedon and Sophocles, after weighing from Pylus for Sicily with an Athenian squadron, came to Corcyra, and with the Corcyraeans in the city carried on war upon those that had established themselves on Mount Istone, and who at that time, after crossing over subsequently to the insurrection, commanded the country, and were doing them much damage.
They attacked their strong-hold and took it, but the men, having escaped in a body to a higher eminence, surrendered on condition of giving up their auxiliaries, and letting the Athenian people decide their own fate, after they had given up their arms. So the generals carried them across under truce to the island of Ptychia, to be kept in custody until they were sent to Athens;
with an understanding that if any one were caught running away, the treaty would be void in the case of all.
But the leaders of the popular party at Corcyra, fearing. that the Athenians might not put to death those that were sent to them, contrive the following stratagem.
They persuade some few of the men in the island, by secretly sending friends to them, and instructing them to say, as though with a kind motive, that it was best for them to make their escape as quickly as possible, and that they would themselves get a vessel ready, for that the Athenian generals intended to give them up to the Corcyraean populace.
So when they had persuaded them, and through their own arrangements about the vessel the men were caught sailing away, the treaty was declared void, and the whole party given up to the Corcyraeans.
And the Athenian generals contributed no small share to such a result—that the pretext seemed strictly true, and its contrivers took it in hand more securely—by showing that they would not wish the men to be conveyed to Athens by another party, (they themselves being bound for Sicily,) and so to confer the honour on those who took them there.
When the Corcyraeans had got possession of them, they shut them up in a large building, and afterwards taking them out by twenties, led them through two rows of heavy-armed soldiers posted on each side; the prisoners being bound together, and beaten and stabbed by the men ranged in the lines, wherever any of them happened to see a personal enemy; while men carrying whips went by their side, and hastened on the way those that were proceeding too slowly.
As many as sixty men they took out in this manner, and put to death without the knowledge of those in the building; (for they supposed that they were taking them to be removed to some other place); but when they were aware of it, through some one's having pointed it out to them, they called on the Athenians, and desired that they would themselves put them to death, if they wished.
They refused also any longer to leave the building, and said they would not, as far as they could prevent it, permit any one to come in. The Corcyraeans indeed were themselves not disposed to force a passage by the doors; but having gone up to the top of the building, and broken through the roof, they threw the tiles and discharged their arrows down on them.
The prisoners sheltered themselves as well as they could, while at the same time the greater part were dispatching themselves, by thrusting into their throats the arrows which their enemies discharged, and hanging themselves with the cords from some beds that happened to be in the place, and by making strips from their clothes; and so in every manner during the greater part of the night, (for night came on while the tragedy was acting,) they were destroying themselves, and were dispatched with missiles by those on the roof.
When it was day, the Corcyraeans threw them in layers on waggons, and carried them out of the city;
while all the women that were taken in the building were reduced to slavery. In this way were the Corcyraeans of the mountain cut off by the commons; and the sedition, after raging so violently, came to this termination, at least, as far as the present war is concerned; for of one of the two parties there was nothing left worth mentioning.
The Athenians then sailed away to Sicily, which was their original destination, and carried on the war with their allies there.
At the close of the summer, the Athenians at Naupactus and the Acarnanians made an expedition, and took Anactorium, a city belonging to the Corinthians, which is situated at the mouth of the Ambracian Gulf, and was betrayed to them. And having turned out the Corinthians, Acarnanian settlers from all parts of the country themselves kept possession of the place. And so the summer ended.
The following winter Aristides son of Archippus, a commander of the Athenian ships which had been sent out to the allies to levy contributions, arrested at Eion on the Strymon Artaphernes, a Persian, on his way from the king to Lacedaemon.
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.