On all these latter points the position of the Peloponnesian alliance was far more encouraging. So powerful a body of confederates had never been got together,—not even to resist Xerxes. Not only the entire strength of Peloponnesus—except Argeians and Achæans, both of whom were neutral at first, though the Achæan town of Pellênê joined even at the beginning, and all the rest subsequently—was brought together, but also the Megarians, Bœotians, Phocians, Opuntian Lokrians, Ambrakiots, Leukadians, and Anaktorians. Among these, Corinth, Megara, Sikyon, Pellênê, Elis, Ambrakia, and Leukas, furnished maritime force, while the Bœotians, Phocians, and Lokrians supplied cavalry. Many of these cities, however, supplied hoplites besides; but the remainder of the confederates furnished hoplites only. It was upon this latter force, not omitting the powerful Bœotian cavalry, that the main reliance was placed; especially for the first and most important operation of the war,—the devastation of Attica. Bound together by the strongest common feeling of active antipathy to Athens, the whole confederacy was full of hope and confidence for this immediate forward march,—so gratifying at once both to their hatred and to their love of plunder, by the hand of destruction laid upon the richest country in Greece,—and presenting a chance even of terminating the war at once, if the pride of the Athenians should be so intolerably stung as to provoke them to come out and fight. Certainty of immediate success, at the first outset, a common purpose to be accomplished and a common enemy to be put down, and favorable sympathies throughout Greece,—all these circumstances filled the Peloponnesians with sanguine hopes at the beginning of the war: and the general persuasion was, that Athens, even if not reduced to submission by the first invasion, could not possibly hold out more than two or three summers against the repetition of this destructive process.[219] Strongly did this confidence contrast with the proud and resolute submission to necessity, not without desponding anticipations of the result, which reigned among the auditors of Periklês.[220]
But though the Peloponnesians entertained confident belief of carrying their point by simple land-campaign, they did not neglect auxiliary preparations for naval and prolonged war. The Lacedæmonians resolved to make up the naval force already existing among themselves and their allies to an aggregate of five hundred triremes; chiefly by the aid of the friendly Dorian cities on the Italian and Sicilian coast. Upon each of them a specific contribution was imposed, together with a given contingent; orders being transmitted to them to make such preparations silently without any immediate declaration of hostility against Athens, and even without refusing for the present to admit any single Athenian ship into their harbors.[221] Besides this, the Lacedæmonians laid their schemes for sending envoys to the Persian king, and to other barbaric powers,—a remarkable evidence of melancholy revolution in Grecian affairs, when that potentate, whom the common arm of Greece had so hardly repulsed a few years before, was now invoked to bring the Phenician fleet again into the Ægean for the purpose of crushing Athens.
The invasion of Attica, however, without delay, was the primary object to be accomplished; and for that the Lacedæmonians issued circular orders immediately after the attempted surprise at Platæa. Though the vote of the allies was requisite to sanction any war, yet when that vote had once been passed, the Lacedæmonians took upon themselves to direct all the measures of execution. Two-thirds of the hoplites of each confederate city,—apparently two-thirds of a certain assumed rating, for which the city was held liable in the books of the confederacy, so that the Bœotians and others who furnished cavalry were not constrained to send two-thirds of their entire force of hoplites,—were summoned to be present on a certain day at the isthmus of Corinth, with provisions and equipment for an expedition of some length.[222] On the day named, the entire force was found duly assembled, and the Spartan king Archidamus, on taking the command, addressed to the commanders and principal officers from each city a discourse of solemn warning as well as encouragement. His remarks were directed chiefly to abate the tone of sanguine over-confidence which reigned in the army. After adverting to the magnitude of the occasion, the mighty impulse agitating all Greece, and the general good wishes which accompanied them against an enemy so much hated,—he admonished them not to let their great superiority of numbers and bravery seduce them into a spirit of rash disorder. “We are about to attack (he said) an enemy admirably equipped in every way, so that we may be very certain that they will come out and fight,[223] even if they be not now actually on the march to meet us at the border, at least when they see us in their territory ravaging and destroying their property. All men exposed to any unusual indignity become incensed, and act more under passion than under calculation, when it is actually brought under their eyes: much more will the Athenians do so, accustomed as they are to empire, and to ravage the territory of others rather than to see their own so treated.”
Immediately on the army being assembled, Archidamus sent Melêsippus as envoy to Athens to announce the coming invasion, being still in hopes that the Athenians would yield. But a resolution had been already adopted, at the instance of Periklês, to receive neither herald nor envoy from the Lacedæmonians when once their army was on its march: so that Melêsippus was sent back without even being permitted to enter the city. He was ordered to quit the territory before sunset, with guides to accompany him and prevent him from addressing a word to any one. On parting from his guides at the border, Melêsippus exclaimed,[224] with a solemnity but too accurately justified by the event: “This day will be the beginning of many calamities to the Greeks.”
Archidamus, as soon as the reception of his last envoy was made known to him, continued his march from the isthmus into Attica,—which territory he entered by the road of Œnoê, the frontier Athenian fortress of Attica towards Bœotia. His march was slow, and he thought it necessary to make a regular attack on the fort of Œnoê, which had been put into so good a state of defence, that after all the various modes of assault, in which the Lacedæmonians were not skilful, had been tried in vain,[225]—and after a delay of several days before the place,—he was compelled to renounce the attempt.
The want of enthusiasm on the part of the Spartan king,—his multiplied delays, first at the isthmus, next in the march, and lastly before Œnoê,—were all offensive to the fiery impatience of the army, who were loud in their murmurs against him. He acted upon the calculation already laid down in his discourse at Sparta,[226]—that the highly cultivated soil of Attica was to be looked upon as a hostage for the pacific dispositions of the Athenians, who would be more likely to yield when devastation, though not yet inflicted, was nevertheless impending, and at their doors. In this point of view, a little delay at the border was no disadvantage; and perhaps the partisans of peace at Athens may have encouraged him to hope that it would enable them to prevail. Nor can we doubt that it was a moment full of difficulty to Periklês at Athens. He had to proclaim to all the proprietors in Attica the painful truth, that they must prepare to see their lands and houses overrun and ruined; and that their persons, families, and movable property, must be brought in for safety either to Athens, or to one of the forts in the territory,—or carried across to one of the neighboring islands. It would, indeed, make a favorable impression when he told them that Archidamus was his own family friend, yet only within such limits as consisted with duty to the city: in case, therefore, the invaders, while ravaging Attica, should receive instruction to spare his own lands, he would forthwith make them over to the state as public property: nor was such a case unlikely to arise, if not from the personal feeling of Archidamus, at least from the deliberate manœuvre of the Spartans, who would seek thus to set the Athenian public against Periklês, as they had tried to do before by demanding the banishment of the sacrilegious Alkmæônid race.[227] But though this declaration would doubtless provoke a hearty cheer, the lesson which he had to inculcate, not simply for admission as prudent policy, but for actual practice, was one revolting alike to the immediate interest, the dignity, and the sympathies of his countrymen. To see their lands all ravaged, without raising an arm to defend them,—to carry away their wives and families, and to desert and dismantle their country residences, as they had done during the Persian invasion,—all in the confidence of compensation in other ways and of remote ultimate success,—were recommendations which, probably, no one but Periklês could have hoped to enforce. They were, moreover, the more painful to execute, inasmuch as the Athenian citizens had very generally retained the habits of residing permanently, not in Athens, but in the various demes of Attica; many of which still preserved their temples, their festivals, their local customs, and their limited municipal autonomy, handed down from the day when they had once been independent of Athens.[228] It was but recently that the farming, the comforts, and the ornaments, thus distributed over Attica, had been restored from the ruin of the Persian invasion, and brought to a higher pitch of improvement than ever; yet the fruits of this labor, and the scenes of these local affections, were now to be again deliberately abandoned to a new aggressor, and exchanged for the utmost privation and discomfort. Archidamus might well doubt whether the Athenians would nerve themselves up to the pitch of resolution necessary for this distressing step, when it came to the actual crisis; and whether they would not constrain Periklês against his will to make propositions for peace. His delay on the border, and postponement of actual devastation, gave the best chance for such propositions being made; though as this calculation was not realized, the army raised plausible complaints against him for having allowed the Athenians time to save so much of their property.
From all parts of Attica the residents flocked within the spacious walls of Athens, which now served as shelter for the houseless, like Salamis, forty-nine years before: entire families with all their movable property, and even with the woodwork of their houses; the sheep and cattle were conveyed to Eubœa and the other adjoining islands.[229] Though a few among the fugitives obtained dwellings or reception from friends, the greater number were compelled to encamp in the vacant spaces of the city and Peiræus, or in and around the numerous temples of the city,—always excepting the acropolis and the eleusinion, which were at all times strictly closed to profane occupants; but even the ground called the Pelasgikon, immediately under the acropolis, which, by an ancient and ominous tradition, was interdicted to human abode,[230] was made use of under the present necessity. Many, too, placed their families in the towers and recesses of the city walls,[231] or in sheds, cabins, tents, or even tubs, disposed along the course of the long walls to Peiræus. In spite of so serious an accumulation of losses and hardships, the glorious endurance of their fathers in the time of Xerxes was faithfully copied, and copied too under more honorable circumstances, since at that time there had been no option possible; whereas, the march of Archidamus might, perhaps, now have been arrested by submissions, ruinous indeed to Athenian dignity, yet not inconsistent with the security of Athens, divested of her rank and power. Such submissions, if suggested as they probably may have been by the party opposed to Periklês, found no echo among the suffering population.
After having spent several days before Œnoê without either taking the fort or receiving any message from the Athenians, Archidamus marched onward to Eleusis and the Thriasian plain,—about the middle of June, eighty days after the surprise of Platæa. His army was of irresistible force, not less than sixty thousand hoplites, according to the statement of Plutarch,[232] or of one hundred thousand, according to others: considering the number of constituent allies, the strong feeling by which they were prompted, and the shortness of the expedition combined with the chance of plunder, even the largest of these two numbers is not incredibly great, if we take it to include not hoplites only, but cavalry and light-armed also: but as Thucydidês, though comparatively full in his account of this march, has stated no general total, we may presume that he had heard none upon which he could rely. As the Athenians had made no movement towards peace, Archidamus anticipated that they would come forth to meet him in the fertile plain of Eleusis and Thria, which was the first portion of territory that he sat down to ravage: but no Athenian force appeared to oppose him, except a detachment of cavalry, who were repulsed in a skirmish near the small lakes called Rheiti. Having laid waste this plain without any serious opposition, Archidamus did not think fit to pursue the straight road which from Thria conducted directly to Athens across the ridge of Mount Ægaleos, but turned off to the westward, leaving that mountain on his right hand until he came to Krôpeia, where he crossed a portion of the line of Ægaleos over to Acharnæ. He was here about seven miles from Athens, on a declivity sloping down into the plain which stretches westerly and northwesterly from Athens, and visible from the city walls: and he here encamped, keeping his army in perfect order for battle, but at the same time intending to damage and ruin the place and its neighborhood. Acharnæ was the largest and most populous of all the demes in Attica, furnishing no less than three thousand hoplites to the national line, and flourishing as well by its corn, vines, and olives, as by its peculiar abundance of charcoal-burning from the forests of ilex on the neighboring hills: moreover, if we are to believe Aristophanês, the Acharnian proprietors were not merely sturdy “hearts of oak,” but peculiarly vehement and irritable.[233] It illustrates the condition of a Grecian territory under invasion, when we find this great deme, which could not have contained less than twelve thousand free inhabitants of both sexes and all ages, with at least an equal number of slaves, completely deserted. Archidamus calculated that when the Athenians actually saw his troops so close to their city, carrying fire and sword over their wealthiest canton, their indignation would become uncontrollable, and they would march out forthwith to battle. The Acharnian proprietors especially, he thought, would be foremost in inflaming this temper, and insisting upon protection to their own properties,—or, if the remaining citizens refused to march out along with them, they would, after having been thus left undefended to ruin, become discontented and indifferent to the general weal.[234]
Though his calculation was not realized, it was, nevertheless, founded upon most rational grounds. What Archidamus anticipated was on the point of happening, and nothing prevented it, except the personal ascendency of Periklês, strained to its very utmost. So long as the invading army was engaged in the Thriasian plain, the Athenians had some faint hope that it might—like Pleistoanax, fourteen years before—advance no farther into the interior: but when it came to Acharnæ, within sight of the city walls,—when the ravagers were actually seen destroying buildings, fruit-trees, and crops, in the plain of Athens, a sight strange to every Athenian eye except to those very old men who recollected the Persian invasion,—the exasperation of the general body of citizens rose to a pitch never before known. The Acharnians first of all, next the youthful citizens generally,—became madly clamorous for arming and going forth to fight. Knowing well their own great strength, but less correctly informed of the superior strength of the enemy, they felt confident that victory was within their reach. Groups of citizens were everywhere gathered together,[235] angrily debating the critical question of the moment; while the usual concomitants of excited feeling,—oracles and prophecies of diverse tenor, many of them, doubtless, promising success against the enemy at Acharnæ,—were eagerly caught up and circulated.
In this inflamed temper of the Athenian mind, Periklês was naturally the great object of complaint and wrath. He was denounced as the cause of all the existing suffering: he was reviled as a coward for not leading out the citizens to fight, in his capacity of general: the rational convictions as to the necessity of the war and the only practicable means of carrying it on, which his repeated speeches had implanted, seemed to be altogether forgotten.[236] This burst of spontaneous discontent was, of course, fomented by the numerous political enemies of Periklês, and particularly by Kleon,[237] now rising into importance as an opposition-speaker; whose talent for invective was thus first exercised under the auspices of the high aristocratical party, as well as of an excited public. But no manifestations, however violent, could disturb either the judgment or the firmness of Periklês. He listened, unmoved, to all the declarations made against him, and resolutely refused to convene any public assembly, or any meeting invested with an authorized character, under the present irritated temper of the citizens.[238] It appears that he, as general, or rather the board of ten generals, among whom he was one, must have been invested constitutionally with the power, not only of calling the ekklesia when they thought fit, but also of preventing it from meeting,[239] and of postponing even those regular meetings which commonly took place at fixed times, four times in the prytany. No assembly, accordingly, took place, and the violent exasperation of the people was thus prevented from realizing itself in any rash public resolution. That Periklês should have held firm against this raging force, is but one among the many honorable points in his political character; but it is far less wonderful than the fact, that his refusal to call the ekklesia was efficacious to prevent the ekklesia from being held. The entire body of Athenians were now assembled within the walls, and if he refused to convoke the ekklesia, they might easily have met in the Pnyx, without him; for which it would not have been difficult at such a juncture to provide plausible justification. The inviolable respect which the Athenian people manifested on this occasion for the forms of their democratical constitution—assisted doubtless by their long-established esteem for Periklês, yet opposed to an excitement alike intense and pervading, and to a demand apparently reasonable, in so far as regarded the calling of an assembly for discussion,—is one of the most memorable incidents in their history.