History of The Peloponnesian War - Book I   

is rather fitting for those who have injustice in contemplation.
Vote therefore, Lacedaemonians, for war, as the honour of Sparta
demands, and neither allow the further aggrandizement of Athens, nor
betray our allies to ruin, but with the gods let us advance against
the aggressors."
With these words he, as ephor, himself put the question to the
assembly of the Lacedaemonians. He said that he could not determine
which was the loudest acclamation (their mode of decision is by
acclamation not by voting); the fact being that he wished to make them
declare their opinion openly and thus to increase their ardour for
war. Accordingly he said: "All Lacedaemonians who are of opinion
that the treaty has been broken, and that Athens is guilty, leave your
seats and go there," pointing out a certain place; "all who are of the
opposite opinion, there." They accordingly stood up and divided; and
those who held that the treaty had been broken were in a decided
majority. Summoning the allies, they told them that their opinion
was that Athens had been guilty of injustice, but that they wished
to convoke all the allies and put it to the vote; in order that they
might make war, if they decided to do so, on a common resolution.
Having thus gained their point, the delegates returned home at once;
the Athenian envoys a little later, when they had dispatched the
objects of their mission. This decision of the assembly, judging
that the treaty had been broken, was made in the fourteenth year of
the thirty years' truce, which was entered into after the affair of
Euboea.
The Lacedaemonians voted that the treaty had been broken, and that
the war must be declared, not so much because they were persuaded by
the arguments of the allies, as because they feared the growth of
the power of the Athenians, seeing most of Hellas already subject to
them.
CHAPTER IV.

From the end of the Persian to the beginning
of the Peloponnesian War - The Progress
from Supremacy to Empire

THE way in which Athens came to be placed in the circumstances
under which her power grew was this. After the Medes had returned
from Europe, defeated by sea and land by the Hellenes, and after
those of them who had fled with their ships to Mycale had been
destroyed, Leotychides, king of the Lacedaemonians, the commander of
the Hellenes at Mycale, departed home with the allies from
Peloponnese. But the Athenians and the allies from Ionia and
Hellespont, who had now revolted from the King, remained and laid
siege to Sestos, which was still held by the Medes. After wintering
before it, they became masters of the place on its evacuation by the
barbarians; and after this they sailed away from Hellespont to their
respective cities. Meanwhile the Athenian people, after the departure
of the barbarian from their country, at once proceeded to carry over
their children and wives, and such property as they had left, from
the places where they had deposited them, and prepared to rebuild
their city and their walls. For only isolated portions of the
circumference had been left standing, and most of the houses were in
ruins; though a few remained, in which the Persian grandees had taken
up their quarters.
Perceiving what they were going to do, the Lacedaemonians sent an
embassy to Athens. They would have themselves preferred to see neither
her nor any other city in possession of a wall; though here they acted
principally at the instigation of their allies, who were alarmed at
the strength of her newly acquired navy and the valour which she had
displayed in the war with the Medes. They begged her not only to
abstain from building walls for herself, but also to join them in
throwing down the walls that still held together of the
ultra-Peloponnesian cities. The real meaning of their advice, the