Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/198

170 was commanded by Brasidas, one of the most able commanders produced by Sparta in the early years of the war, who failed, however, in an attack on the Piraeus. These years were a time of great distress in Athens owing to an outbreak of plague, which caused the death of many thousands, and demoralised the survivors by the constant peril, and the relaxation of all the usual restraints which it produced. The people turned fiercely upon Pericles, whom they regarded as the origin of their sufferings, both as having caused the war and induced them to crowd the city with countrymen and cattle. He was fined and deposed from his office of Strategus. And though the people shortly repented, and finding that they could not do without him, reinstated him in power, within a twelvemonth he himself fell a victim to the pestilence (B.C. 429).

The next two years (B.C. 428–427) were marked by the revolt of Lesbos, which compelled the Athenians to maintain a blockade of Mitylene through the winter, and involved them in heavy expenses. The Peloponnesians, however, failed to take advantage of this difficulty in time. Before their fleet reached Lesbos in the following spring an uprising of the democratic party in Mitylene had compelled a surrender of the town to the Athenians. The Athenians were particularly exasperated by this outbreak at Lesbos. Up to this time their fleets had been employed, on the whole with success, in the West. This revolt forced them to maintain the conflict in two directions at once. They therefore determined to make a signal example, and a decree