After having ravaged Laconia for seven days with impunity, Nicias returned to Thyrea in Cynuria, where the Spartans had established the Æginetans. He took the city despite the proximity of a Lacedæmonian army which did not venture to aid it, and his prisoners were sent to Athens and there put to death. This new-born national greatness, if such a return to savagery can merit the name, increased constantly in power: the foe was a criminal meriting punishment and his defeat equivalent to a sentence of death. In just this period occurred a tragedy, the story of which we would refuse to receive were it not for Thucydides’ direct affirmation; the massacre of two thousand of the bravest helots for the sole purpose of weakening the corps and of frightening those of their companions to whom the success of Athens might have given the idea of revolt. Overwhelmed by so many reverses and fearful of seeing war established permanently around Laconia, at Pylos, Cythera, and Cynuria, the Spartans shrank from further action. Whatever step they took might lead them into error and having never learned the lessons of misfortune, they remained irresolute and timid. The Athenians, on the contrary, were full of confidence in their good fortune. The Greeks in Sicily having brought their wars to a close by a general reconciliation, the generals sent to that country by the Athenians allowed themselves to be included in the treaty. On their return the people condemned two of them to exile and one to a heavy fine, on the pretext that they had it in their power to subjugate Sicily but had been bought off by presents. The Athenian people believed themselves to be irresistible, and in the loftiness of their aspirations denied to any enterprise, whether practicable or not, the possibility of defeat. This was the forerunner of the fatal madness that seized them when Alcibiades planned the unfortunate expedition into Sicily.
Athens was thus taking everywhere the offensive, and Sparta, paralysed, had entirely ceased to act; she had recourse again to Darius, begging aid more insistently than ever, thus betraying the cause of all Greece and dimming the glory of their deeds at Thermopylæ. The Athenians intercepted the Persian Artaphernes in Thrace. In the letter this envoy bore, the king set forth that not being able to grasp the meaning of the Spartans—no two of their envoys delivering to him the same message—he had thought best in order to come to a clear understanding, to send them a deputy. Athens at once took steps to neutralise Sparta’s measures; perhaps even to supplant her in the favour of the Great King, and sent Artaphernes back honourably accompanied by ambassadors. From now on Greece was to witness the shameful spectacle offered by the descendants of the victors of Salamis and Platæa bowing down to the successors of Xerxes. At Ephesus the embassy learnt of the death of the Great King and went no further; but Athens had none the less been false, in intent if not in deed, to all the traditions of her past, and was to expiate her sin without delay.
A CHECK TO ATHENS; BRASIDAS BECOMES AGGRESSIVE
[424 B.C.]
Demosthenes’ able plan had succeeded; the Peloponnesus was encircled by hostile posts; there now remained but to shut off the isthmus and imprison the Spartans in their retreat. One way of doing this was to occupy Megara, but a still better method would be to obtain an alliance with Bœotia. The attempt on Megara having failed, Demosthenes turned his attention to Bœotia. He held secret communication with the inhabitants of Chæronea, who promised to deliver over the city to a body of Athenians who were to leave Naupactus unseen, aided by the Phocians, while he himself was to storm Siphæ on the Gulf of Crissa, the Athenian general Hippocrates being charged with the capture of Delium, on the Eubœan side. These three enterprises were to be executed the same day, and if they succeeded, Bœotia, like the Peloponnesus, would be encircled by a hostile ring, and Thebes would be separated from Lacedæmon. But too many were in the secret to allow of its being kept, the enemy was warned and the three Athenian forces, failing to act in concert, lost the advantage that would have lain in a simultaneous attack.
The enterprise against Siphæ and Chæronea failed also and Hippocrates, delayed a few days in his advance, found arrayed against him in one body all the Bœotian forces that he and his colleagues had plotted to divide. He succeeded in occupying Delium and fortified the temple of Apollo found there. To the Bœotians it was profanation to turn a temple into a fortress, and this scruple was shared by many of the Athenians who entered but half-heartedly into the combat. A thousand hoplites with their chief perished in the action; contrary to sacred usage Thebes let the bodies of the dead lie without sepulture seventeen days, until the taking of Delium; holding them to be sacrilegious evil-doers whose wandering souls were to receive punishment in the infernal world.
Socrates had taken part in this battle. In company with his friend Laches and some others equally brave, he had held his ground to the last, retreating step by step before the Theban cavalry. Simultaneously with this display of heroism Aristophanes was writing his comedy, the Clouds.
Sparta possessed but one man of ability, Brasidas, who had saved Megara, menaced Piræus, and almost defeated Demosthenes at Pylos. Clear-sighted and brave to the point of audacity, he possessed an additional weapon, one that was capable of inflicting cruel wounds, and that the Spartans had hitherto known little how to use, eloquence. The sea being closed to him, he decided that it would be possible to injure Athens seriously both in fortune and renown without leaving the land. The very policy she had used against Sparta, Pylos, Cythera, and Methone, could now be turned against her in Chalcidice and Thrace. At the commencement of the war she had forced Perdiccas, king of Macedonia, to enter her alliance and had gained the friendship of Sitalces the powerful king of the Odrysians, whose territory extended from the Ægean Sea to the Danube, and from Byzantium to the source of the Strymon, a distance not to be covered under thirty days’ travel.
At Athens’ instigation Sitalces had in 429 invaded Macedonia, but since then his zeal had cooled. Perdiccas, on his side, had never lost an opportunity of secretly injuring the Athenians. Even at this moment he was urging Sparta to send an expedition to Chalcidice and the coast of Thrace. To deprive Athens of these regions whence she obtained her timber was to attack her in her navy, and to carry at the same time the centre of hostilities towards the north, was to draw her away from the Peloponnesus which had lately suffered so many ills. Brasidas was charged with the enterprise, but Sparta refused to engage in it deeply. He raised a force of seven hundred helots who were armed as hoplites, to which were added a thousand Peloponnesians attracted by Perdiccas’ promises. This was little; but Brasidas held in reserve the treacherous but magical word, Liberty, that was to open for him many gates.