The Historians' History of the World 03 [Greece to the Peloponnesian War]

At the end of the same summer, Aristeus, a Corinthian, Aneristus, Nicolaus, and Stratodemus, ambassadors of the Lacedæmonians, Timagoras, a Tegean, and Pollis, an Argive in a private capacity, being on their way to Asia, to obtain an interview with the king, if by any means they might prevail on him to supply money and join in the war, went first to Thrace, to Sitalces the son of Teres, wishing to persuade him, if they could, to withdraw from his alliance with the Athenians. He gave orders to deliver them up to the Athenian ambassadors; who, having received them, took them to Athens. On their arrival the Athenians, being afraid that if Aristeus escaped he might do them still more mischief (for even before this he had evidently conducted all the measures in Potidæa and their possessions Thrace-ward) without giving them a trial, though they requested to say something in their own defence, put them to death that same day, and threw them into pits; thinking it but just to requite them in the same way as the Lacedæmonians had begun with; for they had killed and thrown into pits the merchants, both of the Athenians and their allies, whom they had taken on board trading vessels about the coast of the Peloponnesus. Indeed all that the Lacedæmonians took on the sea at the beginning of the war, they butchered as enemies, both those who were confederates of the Athenians and those who were neutral.

The following winter, the Athenians sent twenty ships round the Peloponnese, with Phormion as commander, who, making Naupactus his station, kept watch that no one either sailed out from Corinth and the Crissæan Bay, or into it. Another squadron of six they sent towards Caria and Lycia, with Melesander as commander, to raise money from those parts, and to hinder the privateers of the Peloponnesians from making that their rendezvous, and interfering with the navigation of the merchantmen from Phaselis and Phœnicia, and the continent in that direction. But Melesander, having gone up the country into Lycia with a force composed of the Athenians from the ships and the allies, and being defeated in a battle, was killed, and lost a considerable part of the army.

The same winter, when the Potidæans could no longer hold out against their besiegers, the inroads of the Peloponnesians into Attica having had no more effect towards causing the Athenians to withdraw, and their provisions being exhausted, and many other horrors having befallen them in their straits for food, and some having even eaten one another; under these circumstances, they made proposals for a capitulation to the generals of the Athenians who were in command against them, Xenophon, son of Euripides, Histiodorus, son of Aristoclides, and Phanomachus, son of Callimachus; who accepted them, seeing the distress of their army in so exposed a position, and the state having already expended 2000 talents [£400,000 or $2,000,000] on the siege. On these terms therefore they came to an agreement; that themselves, their children, wives, and auxiliaries, should go out of the place with one dress each—but the women with two—and with a fixed sum of money for their journey. According to this treaty, they went out to Chalcidice, or where each could: but the Athenians blamed the generals for having come to an agreement without consulting them; for they thought they might have got possession of the place on their own terms; and afterwards they sent settlers of their own to Potidæa and colonised it. These were the transactions of the winter; and so ended the second year of this war.c

LAST PUBLIC SPEECH OF PERICLES

In his capacity of strategus, Pericles convoked a formal assembly of the people, for the purpose of vindicating himself publicly against the prevailing sentiment, and recommending perseverance in his line of policy. The speeches made by his opponents, assuredly very bitter, are not given by Thucydides; but that of Pericles himself is set down at considerable length, and a memorable discourse it is. It strikingly brings into relief both the character of the man and the impress of actual circumstances—an impregnable mind conscious not only of right purposes but of just and reasonable anticipations, and bearing up with manliness, or even defiance, against the natural difficulty of the case, heightened by an extreme of incalculable misfortune. He had foreseen, while advising the war originally, the probable impatience of his countrymen under its first hardships, but he could not foresee the epidemic by which that impatience had been exasperated into madness; and he now addressed them not merely with unabated adherence to his own deliberate convictions, but also in a tone of reproachful remonstrance against their unmerited change of sentiment towards him—seeking at the same time to combat that uncontrolled despair which, for the moment, overlaid both their pride and their patriotism. Far from humbling himself before the present sentiment, it is at this time that he sets forth his titles to their esteem in the most direct and unqualified manner, and claims the continuance of that which they had so long accorded, as something belonging to him by acquired right.