Taking on board the heavy infantry from Argos they sailed to
Laconia, and, after first plundering part of Epidaurus Limera,
landed on the coast of Laconia, opposite Cythera, where the temple
of Apollo stands, and, laying waste part of the country, fortified a
sort of isthmus, to which the Helots of the Lacedaemonians might
desert, and from whence plundering incursions might be made as from
Pylos. Demosthenes helped to occupy this place, and then immediately
sailed on to Corcyra to take up some of the allies in that island, and
so to proceed without delay to Sicily; while Charicles waited until he
had completed the fortification of the place and, leaving a garrison
there, returned home subsequently with his thirty ships and the
Argives also.
This same summer arrived at Athens thirteen hundred targeteers,
Thracian swordsmen of the tribe of the Dii, who were to have sailed to
Sicily with Demosthenes. Since they had come too late, the Athenians
determined to send them back to Thrace, whence they had come; to
keep them for the Decelean war appearing too expensive, as the pay
of each man was a drachma a day. Indeed since Decelea had been first
fortified by the whole Peloponnesian army during this summer, and then
occupied for the annoyance of the country by the garrisons from the
cities relieving each other at stated intervals, it had been doing
great mischief to the Athenians; in fact this occupation, by the
destruction of property and loss of men which resulted from it, was
one of the principal causes of their ruin. Previously the invasions
were short, and did not prevent their enjoying their land during the
rest of the time: the enemy was now permanently fixed in Attica; at
one time it was an attack in force, at another it was the regular
garrison overrunning the country and making forays for its
subsistence, and the Lacedaemonian king, Agis, was in the field and
diligently prosecuting the war; great mischief was therefore done to
the Athenians. They were deprived of their whole country: more than
twenty thousand slaves had deserted, a great part of them artisans,
and all their sheep and beasts of burden were lost; and as the cavalry
rode out daily upon excursions to Decelea and to guard the country,
their horses were either lamed by being constantly worked upon rocky
ground, or wounded by the enemy.
Besides, the transport of provisions from Euboea, which had before
been carried on so much more quickly overland by Decelea from
Oropus, was now effected at great cost by sea round Sunium; everything
the city required had to be imported from abroad, and instead of a
city it became a fortress. Summer and winter the Athenians were worn
out by having to keep guard on the fortifications, during the day by
turns, by night all together, the cavalry excepted, at the different
military posts or upon the wall. But what most oppressed them was that
they had two wars at once, and had thus reached a pitch of frenzy
which no one would have believed possible if he had heard of it before
it had come to pass. For could any one have imagined that even when
besieged by the Peloponnesians entrenched in Attica, they would still,
instead of withdrawing from Sicily, stay on there besieging in like
manner Syracuse, a town (taken as a town) in no way inferior to
Athens, or would so thoroughly upset the Hellenic estimate of their
strength and audacity, as to give the spectacle of a people which,
at the beginning of the war, some thought might hold out one year,
some two, none more than three, if the Peloponnesians invaded their
country, now seventeen years after the first invasion, after having
already suffered from all the evils of war, going to Sicily and
undertaking a new war nothing inferior to that which they already
had with the Peloponnesians? These causes, the great losses from
Decelea, and the other heavy charges that fell upon them, produced
their financial embarrassment; and it was at this time that they
imposed upon their subjects, instead of the tribute, the tax of a
twentieth upon all imports and exports by sea, which they thought
would bring them in more money; their expenditure being now not the
same as at first, but having grown with the war while their revenues