History of The Peloponnesian War - Book I   

the place Ennea Hodoi as an act of hostility. Meanwhile the Thasians
being defeated in the field and suffering siege, appealed to
Lacedaemon, and desired her to assist them by an invasion of Attica.
Without informing Athens, she promised and intended to do so, but
was prevented by the occurrence of the earthquake, accompanied by
the secession of the Helots and the Thuriats and Aethaeans of the
Perioeci to Ithome. Most of the Helots were the descendants of the old
Messenians that were enslaved in the famous war; and so all of them
came to be called Messenians. So the Lacedaemonians being engaged in a
war with the rebels in Ithome, the Thasians in the third year of the
siege obtained terms from the Athenians by razing their walls,
delivering up their ships, and arranging to pay the moneys demanded at
once, and tribute in future; giving up their possessions on the
continent together with the mine.
The Lacedaemonians, meanwhile, finding the war against the rebels in
Ithome likely to last, invoked the aid of their allies, and especially
of the Athenians, who came in some force under the command of Cimon.
The reason for this pressing summons lay in their reputed skill in
siege operations; a long siege had taught the Lacedaemonians their own
deficiency in this art, else they would have taken the place by
assault. The first open quarrel between the Lacedaemonians and
Athenians arose out of this expedition. The Lacedaemonians, when
assault failed to take the place, apprehensive of the enterprising and
revolutionary character of the Athenians, and further looking upon
them as of alien extraction, began to fear that, if they remained,
they might be tempted by the besieged in Ithome to attempt some
political changes. They accordingly dismissed them alone of the
allies, without declaring their suspicions, but merely saying that
they had now no need of them. But the Athenians, aware that their
dismissal did not proceed from the more honourable reason of the
two, but from suspicions which had been conceived, went away deeply
offended, and conscious of having done nothing to merit such treatment
from the Lacedaemonians; and the instant that they returned home
they broke off the alliance which had been made against the Mede,
and allied themselves with Sparta's enemy Argos; each of the
contracting parties taking the same oaths and making the same alliance
with the Thessalians.
Meanwhile the rebels in Ithome, unable to prolong further a ten
years' resistance, surrendered to Lacedaemon; the conditions being
that they should depart from Peloponnese under safe conduct, and
should never set foot in it again: any one who might hereafter be
found there was to be the slave of his captor. It must be known that
the Lacedaemonians had an old oracle from Delphi, to the effect that
they should let go the suppliant of Zeus at Ithome. So they went forth
with their children and their wives, and being received by Athens from
the hatred that she now felt for the Lacedaemonians, were located at
Naupactus, which she had lately taken from the Ozolian Locrians. The
Athenians received another addition to their confederacy in the
Megarians; who left the Lacedaemonian alliance, annoyed by a war about
boundaries forced on them by Corinth. The Athenians occupied Megara
and Pegae, and built the Megarians their long walls from the city to
Nisaea, in which they placed an Athenian garrison. This was the
principal cause of the Corinthians conceiving such a deadly hatred
against Athens.
Meanwhile Inaros, son of Psammetichus, a Libyan king of the
Libyans on the Egyptian border, having his headquarters at Marea,
the town above Pharos, caused a revolt of almost the whole of Egypt
from King Artaxerxes and, placing himself at its head, invited the
Athenians to his assistance. Abandoning a Cyprian expedition upon
which they happened to be engaged with two hundred ships of their
own and their allies, they arrived in Egypt and sailed from the sea
into the Nile, and making themselves masters of the river and
two-thirds of Memphis, addressed themselves to the attack of the
remaining third, which is called White Castle. Within it were Persians