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.