Page:A general history for colleges and high schools (Myers, 1890).djvu/176

150 By the next morning, however, the Athenians had repented of their hasty and cruel resolution. A second meeting of the assembly was hurriedly called; the barbarous vote was repealed; and a swift trireme, bearing the reprieve, set out in anxious haste to overtake the former galley, which had twenty-four hours the start. The trireme reached the island just in time to prevent the execution of the barbarous edict.

The second resolution of the Athenians, though more discriminating than the first decree, was quite severe enough. Over one thousand of the nobles of Mytilene were killed, the city was destroyed, and the larger part of the lands of the island given to citizens of Athens.

Still more unrelenting and cruel were the Spartans. In the summer of the same year that the Athenians wreaked such vengeance upon the Mytileneans, the Spartans and their allies captured the city of Platæa, put to death all the men, sold the women as slaves, and turned the site of the city into pasture-land.

Events leading up to the Peace of Nicias (421 B.C.).—Soon after the affair at Mytilene and the destruction of Platæa, an enterprising general of the Athenians, named Demosthenes, seized and fortified a point of land (Pylos) on the coast of Messenia. The Spartans made every effort to dislodge the enemy. In the course of the siege, four hundred Spartans under Brasidas, having landed upon a little island (Sphacteria), were so unfortunate as to be cut off from the mainland by the sudden arrival of an Athenian fleet. About three hundred of them were at last captured and taken as prisoners to Athens.

But affairs now took a different turn; the Athenians were worsted (at the battle of Delium, 424 B.C.), and then much indecisive fighting followed. At last negotiations for peace were opened, which, after many embassies to and fro, resulted in what is known as the Peace of Nicias, from the prominent Athenian general who is supposed to have had most to do in bringing it about. The treaty arranged for a truce of fifty years. Each party was to give up to the other all prisoners and captured places.