And on that same day was fought another fight by sea at Mycale in Ionia, where also the barbarians were utterly routed, for the fleet had sailed thither.  And thence the Greeks sailed to Sestos, captured the place, and so went home.

* * * * *

THUCYDIDES

The Peloponnesian War

The Athenian historian, Thucydides, was born about 471 B.C., within ten years of the great repulse of the Persian invasion.  Before he was thirty, the great political ascendancy of Pericles was completely established at Athens, and the ascendancy of Athens among the Greek states was unchallenged, except by Sparta.  He was forty at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War.  Thucydides was appointed to a military command seven years later, but his failure in that office caused his banishment.  From that time he remained an exiled spectator of events; the date of his death is uncertain.  His great work is the history of the Peloponnesian War to its twentieth year, where his history is abruptly broken off.  To Herodotus, history presented itself as a drama; Thucydides views it with the eyes of a philosophical statesman, but writes it also with extraordinary descriptive power, not only in pregnant sentences which have never been effectively rendered in translation, but in passages of sustained intensity, of which it would be vain to reproduce fragments.  The abridged translation given here has been made direct from the Greek.

I.—­The Beginning of the War

I have written the account of the war between Athens and Sparta, since it is the greatest and the most calamitous of all wars hitherto to the Greeks.  For the contest with the Medes was decided in four battles; but this war was protracted over many years, and wrought infinite injury and bloodshed.

Of the immediate causes of the war the first is to be found in the affairs of Epidamnus, Corcyra, and Corinth, of which Corcyra was a colony.  Of the Greek states, the most were joined either to the Athenian or the Peloponnesian league, but Corcyra had joined neither.  But having a quarrel with Corinth about Epidamnus, she now formed an alliance with Athens, whose intervention enraged the Corinthians.

They then helped Potidaea, a Corinthian colony, but an Athenian tributary, to revolt from Athens.  Corinth next appealed to Sparta, as the head of Hellas, to intervene ere it should be too late and check the Athenian aggression, which threatened to make her the tyrant of all Greece.  At Sparta the war party prevailed, although King Archidamus urged that sufficient pressure could be brought to bear without actual hostilities.

The great prosperity and development of Athens since the Persian war had filled other states with fear and jealousy.  She had rebuilt her city walls and refortified the port of Piraeus after the Persian occupation; Sparta had virtually allowed her to take the lead in the subsequent stages of the war, as having the most effective naval force at command.  Hence she had founded the Delian league of the maritime states, to hold the seas against Persia.  At first these states provided fixed contingents of ships and mariners; but Athens was willing enough to accept treasure in substitution, so that she might herself supply the ships and men.