Summer [VI 94–105, VII 1–9]

At the beginning of spring in the following summer the Athenians in Sicily set out from Catana and sailed down the coast to Sicilian Megara, from which, as I have mentioned before, the Syracusans had driven out the inhabitants at the time when Gelon was tyrant, and which they were still occupying themselves. The Athenians landed there and wasted the fields. They also attacked a Syracusan fort, but without success, and so went on again with both fleet and army to the River Terias. Here they went inland and wasted the plain, setting fire to the corn. They encountered a few Syracusans, some of whom they killed, and after setting up a trophy they returned to their ships. They sailed back to Catana and after taking on provisions there they advanced with the whole army against the Sicel township of Centoripa, which agreed terms to come over to them; and then they left, burning the crops of the Inessians and Hyblaeans as they went. On reaching Catana they took receipt of the horsemen who had arrived from Athens – 250 in number, with their equipment but without the horses (which were to be procured in Sicily), together with thirty equestrian archers and 300 talents of silver.

During 95the same spring, the Spartans launched a campaign against Argos and got as far as Cleonae, when there was an earthquake and they turned back. After this the Argives invaded the neighbouring territory of Thyrea and seized a lot of booty from the Spartans, which was sold for at least twenty-five talents. And soon afterwards in the same summer the populace of Thespiae made an attack on the ruling classes there but failed in the attempt. Help arrived from Thebes and some of the rebels were arrested while others escaped to Athens.

Summer [IV 117–33]

Right at the beginning of spring the following summer the Spartans and the Athenians concluded a truce for one year. The thinking on the Athenian side was that Brasidas would not now be able to go on causing more defections and they would be given time to organise things properly; and in addition, if things went well for them, they could enlarge the terms of the agreement. The Spartans for their part recognised exactly what the Athenian apprehensions were and thought that if they had some respite from their trials and tribulations they might be more willing to come to terms, and having returned the men to them might make some longer-term peace agreement as well. It was the men of course that they wanted back above all, since Brasidas was still enjoying a run of success. If he went on to yet further successes and brought about a more equal balance of power they still stood to lose them, even if in carrying on the fight on an equal basis they would have a better chance of final victory.

Summer [III 89–102]

The following summer the Peloponnesians and their allies, led by Agis, son of Archidamus and king of the Spartans, advanced as far as the Isthmus on their way to invade Attica; but there were a number of earthquakes so they turned back again and no invasion took place that year. At about the same time as all these earthquakes were happening, the sea at Orobiae on Euboea receded from what had been the shoreline, then reared up in a wave and overran part of the city. It subsided in some places but engulfed others, so what was formerly dry land is now sea; and the wave killed everyone who could not scramble up in time to higher ground. There was a similar inundation at Atalante, the island off the coast of the Opuntian Locrians, and that carried away part of the Athenian fort and wrecked one of the two ships beached there. At Peparethus too the waters receded some way, but here they did not flood back; and an earthquake demolished part of the city wall there as well as the town hall and a few other houses. The cause of this phenomenon in my view is that at the point where the force of the earthquake is greatest the sea retreats and then suddenly rushes back with renewed power and so produces the inundation. Without an earthquake I do not think anything like this would happen.

Summer [IV 52–88]

Right at the start of the following summer there was a partial eclipse of the sun at the time of the new moon, and early in the same month the earth quaked. The exiles from Mytilene and other parts of Lesbos, most of them setting out from the mainland, gathered together a mercenary force they had hired from the Peloponnese or had recruited on the spot. They captured Rhoeteum, but then gave it back again without having done any harm on receipt of two thousand Phocaean staters. After this they made an expedition against Antandrus and took the city with inside help. It was in fact their intention to liberate the other so-called ‘Actaean cities’ (which the Athenians now held though they were once occupied by Mytilenaeans) and above all to liberate Antandrus. They thought that after strengthening Antandrus, where there was every facility for building ships (with timber locally available and Mount Ida nearby) and other kinds of equipment too, they could from that base more easily inflict damage on Lesbos (which was nearby) and also subdue the Aeolic townships on the mainland. These were the plans they were preparing.

Summer [VIII 61–109, unfinished]

Right at the beginning of spring the following summer the Spartiate Dercylidas was sent with a small force along the coast to the Hellespont to try and bring about a revolt at Abydos, a Milesian colony; and the Chians, while Astyochus was still at a loss how to get help to them, were compelled by the pressures of the siege to undertake a battle at sea. As it happened, while Astyochus was still at Rhodes the Chians had received a new commander from Miletus after the death of Pedaritus, a Spartiate called Leon, who had come out as an officer under Antisthenes; with him they also received twelve ships that had been on guard duty at Miletus (five of them Thurian, four Syracusan, one Anaean, one Milesian and one Leon's own ship). The entire Chian land forces now came out as a body and occupied a strong position; and at the same time their thirty-six ships went to take on the thirty-two ships of the Athenians and the sea battle took place. This was fiercely contested and the Chians and their allies by no means got the worst of the action, but since it was now getting late they returned to the city.

Immediately after this, when Dercylides had completed his march along the coast from Miletus, Abydos in the Hellespont did revolt and went over to Dercylides and Pharnabazus, as did Lampsacus two days later. On learning this, Strombichides hastened in support from Chios, arriving with twenty-four Athenian ships, some of which were troop-transports carrying hoplites. He defeated the Lampsacenes who came out against him and took the city of Lampsacus, which was unwalled, at the first attempt. The property and slaves he seized as booty, but he restored the free population to their homes and then moved against Abydos. That did not surrender, however, and he was unable to take it by assault, so he sailed back to the coast opposite Abydos and established a guard-post at Sestos, a city on the Chersonese which the Persians had once held, to keep watch over the whole of the Hellespont.

Summer [V 82]

The following summer the people of Dium on Mount Athos seceded from Athens to join the Chalcedonians, and the Spartans reorganised affairs in Achaea to suit their own interests better than before. Meanwhile the popular movement in Argos, which had been gradually consolidating its position and recovering its confidence, attacked the oligarchs there, delaying their move to coincide exactly with the celebrations of the Gymnopaediae by the Spartans. There was a battle in the city in which the people got the upper hand, killing some of their opponents and driving others out. Although Sparta's friends in Argos kept sending for their support, for a long time the Spartans did not come; eventually, however, they put off the Gymnopaediae and went to help. But when they learned at Tegea that the oligarchs had been defeated the Spartans refused to go any further, despite the appeals of the fugitives from the city, and returned home to proceed with the festival. Later on representatives from the Argives in the city and from those outside it joined a meeting with the allies present where a great deal was said on each side. The Spartans concluded that the people in the city were in the wrong and decided on military action against Argos, but there were delays and procrastinations. Meanwhile, the people at Argos, in fear of the Spartans and seeking to re-establish an alliance with the Athenians, which they still thought their best hope, started building long walls down to the sea. Their thought was that if they were cut off on the landward side they would still have the advantage, with the help of the Athenians, of being able to import supplies by sea. Some of the cities in the Peloponnese also had inside knowledge about this work of fortification.

Summer [III 1–18]

The following summer, just when the corn was ripening, the Peloponnesians and their allies invaded Attica under the command of Archidamus, son of Zeuxidamus and king of the Spartans. They established a base there and started wasting the land. As usual, the Athenian cavalry launched assaults against them whenever the opportunity arose and so prevented the main body of their light-armed troops from leaving the safety of their camp and causing damage in the areas near the city. The Spartans remained there as long as their provisions lasted, then withdrew and dispersed to their various cities.

Immediately after the Peloponnesian invasion all Lesbos, except Methymna, revolted from Athens. They had been wanting to do that before the war began, but the Spartans were not then willing to receive them as allies. Now, however, they were forced to stage their revolt before they intended. They were still waiting to complete the blockage of the harbour, the construction of the walls and the building of ships, as well as for the arrival of everything they needed from the Black Sea – archers, grain and the other things they had requisitioned. Meanwhile, the Tenedians (who were on bad terms with the Lesbians), the Methymnians and some of the Mytilenaeans themselves, who as representatives of the Athenians had their personal reasons for opposition, were collaborating as informers. They told the Athenians that the Mytilenaeans were forcibly centralising the political control of Lesbos in Mytilene; that they had revolt in mind and were pressing ahead with all their preparations in concert with the Spartans and the Boeotians, their own kinsmen; and that if no one acted now to stop them the Athenians would lose Lesbos.

Summer [VIII 7–28]

The Chians were pressing the Spartans to send the ships, afraid that the Athenians might become aware of the negotiations (since all the discussions with envoys had been kept secret from them). So right at the beginning of spring the following summer the Spartans sent three Spartiates to Corinth to arrange as soon as possible for the ships to be dragged across from the sea the other side of the Isthmus to the side facing Athens; they were then to order the whole fleet to sail for Chios – both the ships Agis was getting ready for Lesbos and the others. The overall total of the allied ships was nineteen.

Calligeitus and Timagoras, who were acting on behalf of Pharnabazus, did not join this expedition to Chios; nor did they contribute the money (amounting to twenty-five talents) which they had brought with them to fund the dispatch of ships, but they planned to sail later with a separate expeditionary force of their own. As for Agis, he saw that the Spartans were intent on going to Chios first and had no objection to this himself. But the allies gathered at Corinth to deliberate on the matter and decided the following: they would first sail to Chios under the command of Chalcideus, who was preparing the five ships in Laconia; then they would proceed to Lesbos under Alcamenes, the man Agis had also had in mind; and finally they would go on to the Hellespont, where Clearchus son of Ramphias had already been assigned the command. They would transport half of the ships across the Isthmus in the first instance, and these would set off straightaway, the idea being to divert Athenian attention from those setting out towards those crossing the Isthmus later. They went about making their voyage from here quite openly, dismissive of what they saw as Athenian impotence – since no fleet of theirs of any size had yet appeared. And in line with these decisions they immediately transported twenty-one ships across.

Summer [III 26–86]

The following summer, after the Peloponnesians had dispatched the forty ships to Mytilene, appointing their admiral Alcidas to take command, they and their allies invaded Attica in order that the Athenians might be harassed by both land and sea and be less able to take action against the ships while they were en route to Mytilene. The leader of this invasion was Cleomenes, acting on behalf of his nephew Pausanias son of Pleistoanax, who was king but still a minor. They wasted Attica, destroying anything that had grown back in the parts previously flattened and anywhere else that had been passed over in the earlier invasions. Indeed from the point of view of the Athenians this was the most severe of all the invasions after the second one. The Peloponnesians pressed on doing extensive damage while all the time expecting to hear news from Lesbos of some accomplishment by their fleet, which they supposed must have made the crossing by then. But when none of their expectations were realised and their supplies of food had run out, they withdrew and went home to their various cities.

Meanwhile the Mytilenaeans were forced to come to terms with the Athenians. The promised ships had failed to arrive from the Peloponnnese but were loitering en route, and their food supplies had also run out. The background was as follows. Salaethus had himself lost confidence that the ships would come and therefore issued the populace, who had previously only had light arms, with full hoplite armour in order to prepare them for an attack on the Athenians. When they had got hold of these arms, however, the people would no longer listen to their leaders but gathered in groups and told those in power to bring the food supplies out into the open and distribute them to everyone; otherwise, they said, they would make their own agreements with the Athenians and surrender the city to them. The authorities realised that they were not in a position to prevent this and saw the dangers of being excluded from any agreement.

Summer [V 57–75]

In the middle of the following summer the Spartans made a move. They were aware that their Epidaurian allies were suffering badly and that the rest of the Peloponnese was either in revolt against them or not well disposed. Thinking, therefore, that if they did not act quickly to arrest the situation things would go from bad to worse, they and the helots launched a full-scale attack on Argos, led by Agis, son of Archidamus and king of the Spartans. They were joined in the campaign by the Tegeans and by all the rest of the Arcadians who were Spartan allies. Meanwhile, their allies from other parts of the Peloponnese and from outside it mustered at Phlius: 5,000 Boeotian hoplites, and as many light-armed soldiers; 5,000 cavalrymen and an equal number of supporting foot-soldiers; 2,000 Corinthian hoplites; and from other states what each could manage, but the full force of Phliasians – since it was in their territory that the army was gathering.

The Argives had advance knowledge of the military preparations the Spartans were making from the start, and when the Spartans moved to Phlius where they wanted to make contact with the others, the Argives took the field themselves. They were supported by the Mantineans, who came with their own allies, and by 3,000 Elean hoplites. They advanced and confronted the Spartans at Methydrium in Arcadia. Each side took up a position on a hill, and the Argives prepared to engage the Spartans in battle while they were on their own; but Agis moved his army by night and eluded them as he made his way to join the other allies at Phlius. At first light the Argives realised this and set out, first to Argos and then on the road to Nemea, where they expected the Spartans would be making their way down with their allies.

Summer [VI 8–62]

Next summer, in the early spring, the Athenian envoys returned from Sicily, accompanied by the Egestans who brought with them sixty talents of uncoined silver as a month's pay for a fleet of sixty ships, which is what they were about to ask the Athenians to send. The Athenians held an assembly and listened to the Egestan envoys and their own telling them various things that were both enticing and untrue, in particular that there was plenty of money available in the temples and the public treasury. They accordingly voted to send sixty ships to Sicily and appointed as generals, with full powers of decision, Alcibiades son of Cleinias, Nicias son of Niceratus and Lamachus son of Xenophanes. These were to support the Egestans against the Selinuntians and to join in restoring the Leontines to their city if the progress of the war allowed it, and in general to take whatever actions in Sicily they judged to be in the best interests of the Athenians.

Four days after this there was another assembly to discuss what provision was needed to equip the ships with all speed and to vote anything else the generals might need for the expedition. Nicias had been elected to the command against his wishes, and he thought that the city had reached the wrong decision and was harbouring ambitions for Sicily as a whole, a huge undertaking but one conceived on the basis of slight and specious considerations. He therefore came forward, hoping to divert them, and advised the Athenians as follows.

Thucydides of Athens wrote the war of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, how they waged it against each other. He began writing at its very outset, in the expectation that this would be a great war and more worthy of account than any previous one. He based this judgement on the grounds that both sides came into the war at the height of their powers and in a full state of military readiness; and he also saw that the rest of the Greek world had either taken sides right at the start or was now planning to do so. This was certainly the greatest ever upheaval among the Greeks, and one which affected a good part of the barbarian world too – even, you could say, most of mankind. In respect of the preceding period and the still remoter past, the length of time that has elapsed made it impossible to ascertain clearly what happened; but from the evidence I find I can trust in pushing my enquiries back as far as possible, I judge that earlier events were not on the same scale, either as regards their wars or in other respects.

It is evident that long ago what is now called ‘Hellas’ had no stable settlements; instead there were various migrations in these early times and each group readily abandoned their own territory whenever forced to do so by those with superior numbers. For there was no commerce and people were insecure about making contact with each other either by land or sea, so they each lived off their own land just at subsistence level and neither produced any surplus goods nor planted the ground, since they had no walls and never knew when some invader might come and rob them. They took the view that they could secure their daily needs for sustenance anywhere, and so were not exercised about uprooting and moving on, with the consequence that they had no cities of any size or other general resources to make them strong.

Summer [II 1–32]

This marks the beginning of the war between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians and the allies on each side, the point from which they only dealt with each other through heralds and were continuously at war once they had started. Events have been recorded in the order of their occurrence, by summers and winters.

The Thirty Year Treaty made after the capture of Euboea remained in force for fourteen years; but in the fifteenth year – that is, when Chrysis had been priestess at Argos for forty-eight years, when Aenesias was ephor at Sparta and Pythadorus still had two months to serve as archon at Athens, in the sixth month after the Battle of Potidaea and at the start of spring – some 300 or more Thebans led by the boetarch Pythangelus son of Phyleides and Diemporus son of Onetorides made an armed entry during the first watch of night into Plataea, a Boeotian city allied to the Athenians. A group of Plataeans invited them in and opened the gates for them – these were Naucleides and his followers, who for reasons of personal ambition wanted to do away with their political opponents and make the city over to the Thebans. They arranged this plan through Eurymachus son of Leontiades, one of the most powerful men in Thebes. The Thebans foresaw that there would be a war and wanted to take the initiative and seize Plataea – which had always been at odds with them – while the peace still held and war had not yet been openly declared. This is why they found it relatively easy to get in unobserved, because no guard had yet been established.

I have commented briefly in the introduction (pp. xxvi–xxvii) on the very different circumstances in which what we think of as ‘texts’ were written and disseminated in the ancient world. We do not have an exact copy of the work that Thucydides wrote, either in its original form or with such revisions as he made himself as he proceeded with it over the course of twenty-five years or more. He did not live to complete the work or the revisions, and in this sense there never has been a single, authoritative ‘master text’, which we could in principle recover. Moreover, even in Thucydides’ day, the versions produced by successive scribes will have contained copying mistakes, which other scribes will have attempted to correct, so introducing further mistakes, and no two ancient copies will have been identical in every respect. Our own texts are derived from just a few medieval manuscripts that also differ from each other and are themselves derived from these earlier versions, many times recopied.

There is a huge scholarship on this textual tradition. See J. S. Rusten's edition of book II (1989), pp. 28–32 and his Thucydides, pp. 481–2 for a summary and a list of some of the main works.

Summer [VII 19–87, VIII 1]

Right at the start of the following spring – at an earlier date than ever before, in fact – the Spartans and their allies invaded Attica, under the command of Agis, son of Archidamus and king of the Spartans. They first wasted the land in the area of the plain and then began building a fort at Deceleia, dividing the work between the allied states. Deceleia is about eleven miles from the city of Athens and approximately the same or a little further from Boeotia. The fort was built overlooking the plain and the richest parts of the land with a view to despoiling them, and it was clearly visible from as far away as the city of Athens.

While the Peloponnesians and their allies were building this fort in Attica, those in the Peloponnese were at about the same time dispatching hoplites to Sicily in transport ships. The Spartans selected the best of the present or recently enfranchised helots, 600 hoplites in all, and sent them under the command of the Spartiate Eccritus; and the Boeotians chose 300 hoplites to go under the command of the Thebans Zenon and Nicon and the Thespian Hegesander. These troops were among the first to sail, putting out into the open sea from Taenarum in Laconia; not long after them the Corinthians sent 500 hoplites, some from Corinth itself, others being Arcadian mercenaries they hired in, and appointed the Corinthian Alexarchus to the command. The Sicyonians dispatched an additional 200 hoplites along with the Corinthians under the command of Sargeus, a Sicyonian. Meanwhile the twenty-five Corinthian ships that had been manned during the winter stood off facing the twenty Athenian ships at Naupactus, which was precisely why they had been manned in the first place – to focus the Athenians’ attention on the triremes rather than the merchant ships.