Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/373

 GRECIAN CONFEDERACY UNDER ATHENS. 540 disaster affected them, by throwing open the road over Geraneia, — Pleistoanax, king of Sparta, was announced as ah-eady on his march for an invasion of Attica. He did, in truth, conduct an army, of mixed Lacedasmonians and Peloponnesian allies, into Attica, as far as the neighborhood of Eleusis and the Thriasian plain. He was a very young man, so that a Spartan of mature years, Kleandrides, had been attached to him by the ephors as adjutant and counsellor. Perikles, it is said, persuaded both the one and the other, by means of large bribes, to evacuate Attica without advancing to Athens. We may well doubt whether they had force enough to adventure so far into the interior, and we shall hereafter observe the great precautions with which Archi- damus thought it necessary to conduct his invasion, during the first year of the Peloponnesian war, though at the head of a more commanding force. Nevertheless, on their return, the Lacedosmonians, believing that they might have achieved it, found both of them guilty of corruption. Both were banished ; Kleandrides never came back, and Pleistoanax himself lived for a long time in sanctuary near the temple of Athene, at Tegea, until at length he procured his restoration by tampering with the Pythian priestess, and by bringing her bought admonitions to act upon the authorities at Sparta.i So soon as the Lacediemonians had retu-ed from Attica, Peri- kles returned with his forces to Euboea, and reconquered the island completely. With that caution which always distinguished him as a military man, so opposite to the fatal rashness of Tol- mides, he took with him an overwhelming force of fifty triremes and five thousand hoplites. He admitted most of the Eubcean towns to surrender, altering the government of Chalkis by the expulsion of the wealthy oligarchy called the Hippobotse ; but the inhabitants of Histitea, at the north of the island, who had taken an Athenian merchantman and massacred all the crew, were more severely dealt with, — the free population being all or in great part expelled, and the land distributed among Athe- nian kleruchs, or out-settled citizens.2 ' Thucyd. i, 114 ; v, 16, Plutarch, Perikles, c. 22.
 * Thucyd. i, 114 ; Plutarch, Perikles, c. 23 ; Diodor. xii, 7.