Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/200

172 scattered villages without walled towns, were an active and gallant people, and knowing every part of the country, harassed and defeated Demosthenes, and followed up their success by an attack upon Naupactus, in which the Athenians had settled the vanquished Messenians, valuing their possession of it highly as commanding the entrance to the gulf of Corinth. But a peace formed between Acarnania and Ambracia at the close of this year put an end to these operations in the West, and though the Athenians continued to send ships and men to Sicily on various pretexts, nothing of importance occurred there, and a general pacification effected between the Sicilian cities in B.C. 424 closed that field for Athenian energies also.

The interest of the struggle in B.C. 425 and 424 is rather in Greece itself. In B.C. 425 the accidental occupation of Pylos, in Messenia, by Demosthenes, who was on his way to Sicily with general orders to operate on the coast of the Peloponnese in the course of his voyage in any way that seemed good to him, caused great alarm at Sparta. A party of Spartan soldiers were placed on Sphacteria, a small island opposite Pylos, and stretching across the bay, who in their turn were blockaded by the Athenian fleet, and after holding out for some time were captured by Cleon, who, accusing the generals of backwardness, was sent personally to take the command. A Messenian garrison was then placed in Pylos to carry on a constant warfare of plunder on Lacedaemonian territory. The Spartans were now eager for peace and the recovery of their men who were prisoners at