Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/159

 BEGINNING OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR- 137 the Megarid, instead of going straight home. The junction of the two formed the largest Athenian force that had ever yet been seen together : there were ten thousand citizen hoplites, indepen- dent of three thousand others who were engaged in the siege of Potidxa, and three thousand metic hoplites, besides a large number of light troops. 1 Against so large a force the Megarians oould of course make no head, and their territory was all laid waste, even to the city walls. For several years of the war, the Athenians inflicted this destruction once, and often twice in the same year: a decree was proposed in the Athenian ekklesia by Charinus, though perhaps not carried, to the effect that the stra- tegi every year should swear, as a portion of their oath of office, 2 that they would twice invade and ravage the Megarid. As the Athenians at the same time kept the port of Nisaea blocked sp, by means of their superior naval force and of the neighboring coast of Salamis, the privations imposed on the Megarians be- came extreme and intolerable. 3 Not merely their corn and fruits, but even their garden vegetables near the city, were rooted up and destroyed, and their situation seems often to have been that of a besieged city hard pressed by famine. Even in the time of Pausanias, so many centuries afterwards, the miseries of the town during these years were remembered and communicated to him, being assigned as the reason why one of their most mem- orable statues had never been completed. 4 To these various military operations of Athens during the course of this summer, some other measures of moment are to be added ; and Thucydides also notices an eclipse of the sun which modern astronomical calculations refer to the third of August : had this eclipse happened three months earlier, immediately before the entrance of the Peloponnesians into Attica, it might 1 Thucyd. ii, 31 Diodor. xii. 44. 2 Plutarch, Perikles, c. 30. 3 See the striking picture in the Acharneis of Aristophanes (685-781) of tbe distressed Megarian selling his hungry children into slavery with thcit o'.vn consent : also Aristoph. Pac. 482. The position of Megara, as the ally of Sparta and enemy of Athens, was uncomfortable in the same manner, though nat to the same intense pitch of suffering, in the war which preceded the battle of Leuktra, r.ea/ fifty years after this (Demosthen. cont. Near., p. 1357, c. 12). 4 Pausan. i, 40, 3.