Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/147

 BEGINNING OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR. 125 But though the Peloponnesians entertained confident belief of carrying their point by simple land-campaign, they did not neg- lect auxiliary preparations for naval and prolonged war. The Lacedaemonians resolved to make up the naval force already existing among themselves and their allies to an aggregate of five hundred triremes ; chiefly by the aid of the friendly Dorian cities on the Italian and Sicilian coast. Upon each of them a specific contribution was imposed, together with a given contin- gent. ; orders being transmitted to them to make such prepara- tions silently without any immediate declaration of hostility against Athens, and even without refusing for the present to admit any single Athenian ship into their harbors. 1 Besides this, the Lacedaemonians laid their schemes for sending envoys to the Persian king, and to other barbaric powers, a remark- able evidence of melancholy revolution in Grecian affairs, when that potentate, whom the common arm of Greece had so hardly repulsed a few years before, was now invoked to bring the Phenician fleet again into the uiEgean for the purpose of crushing Athens. The invasion of Attica, however, without delay, was the pri- mary object to be accomplished ; and for that the Lacedaemonians issued circular orders immediately after the attempted surprise at Plataea. Though the vote of the allies was requisite to sanction any war, yet when that vote had once been passed, the Lacedae- monians took upon themselves to direct all the measures of ex- ecution. Two-thirds of the hoplites of each confederate city, apparently two-thirds of a certain assumed rating, for which the city was held liable in the books of the confederacy, so that the Boeotians and others who furnished cavalry were not constrained to send two-thirds of their entire force of hoplites, weresum- -loned to be present on a certain day at the isthmus of Corinth, with provisions and equipment for an expedition of some length. 2 TO TTpurov, n-epiyeyev7]O-&ai, K(iTa<ppovfjaavTEe ydy KOI T i&ieade. It is Nikias, who, in dissuading the expedition against Syracuse, reminds the Athenians of their past despondency at the beginning of the war. 1 Thucyd. ii, 7. Diodorus says that the Italian and Sicilian allies were required to furnish two hundred triremes (xii, 41). Nothing of the kfcH fcems to have been actually furnished. * Thucyd. ii, 10-ia