Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/152

 130 HISTORY OF GREECE. the city walls, 1 or in sheds, cabins, tents, or even tubs, disposed along the course of the long walls to Peiraeus. In spite of so serious an accumulation of losses and hardships, the glorious endurance of their fathers in the time of Xerxes was faithfully copied, and copied too under more honorable circumstances, since at tha, time there had been no option possible ; whereas, the march of Archidamus might, perhaps, now have been arrested by submissions, ruinous indeed to Athenian dignity, yet not incon- sistent with the security of Athens, divested of her rank and power. Such submissions, if suggested as they probably may have been by the party opposed to Perikles, found no echo among the suffering population. After having spent several days before CEnoe without either taking the fort or receiving any message from the Athenians, Archidamus marched onward to Eleusis and the Thriasian plain, about the middle of June, eighty days after the surprise of Plataea. His army was of irresistible force, not less than sixty thousand hoplites, according to the statement of Plutarch, 2 or of one hundred thousand, according to others : considering the number of constituent allies, the strong feeling by which they were prompted, and the shortness of the expedition com- bined with the chance of plunder, even the largest of these two numbers is not incredibly great, if we take it to include not hoplites only, but cavalry and light-armed also : but as Thucy- dides, though comparatively full in his account of this march, has stated no general total, we may presume that he had heard none upon which he could rely. As the Athenians had made no movement towards peace, Archidamus anticipated that they would come forth to meet him in the fertile plain of Eleusis and Thria, which was the first portion of territory that he sat down to ravage : but no Athenian force appeared to oppose him, except a detachment of cavalry, who were repulsed in a skirmish near the small lakes called Rheiti. Having laid waste this plain without any serious opposition, Archidamus did not think fit to 1 Aristophanes, Equites, 789. OIKOVVT' h> rot? TrttiuKvaioi KUV -y KOI nvpyidioie. The philosopher Diogenes, in taking up his abode in a tub had thus examples n history to follow.
 * Plutarch, Perikles, c. 33.