Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/252

 230 HISTORY OF GREECE. been here present, might have made no mean reply to this por- tion of their reasoning ; he would have urged that, had Athens felt any dispositions towards such a scheme, she would have taken advantage of the fourteen years' truce to execute it ; and he would have shown that the degradation of the allies b} Athens, and the change in her position from president to despot, had been far less intentional and systematic than the Mitylenrean orator affirmed. To the Feloponnesian auditors, however, the speech of the latter proved completely satisfactory ; the Lesbians were declarer members of the Peloponnesian alliance, and a second attack upon Attica was decreed. The Lacedaemonians, foremost in the movement, summoned contingents from their various allies, and were early in arriving with their own at the isthmus : they there began to prepare carriages or trucks for dragging across the isthmus the triremes which had fought against Phormio, from the harbor of Lechaeum into the Saronic gulf, in order to employ them against Athens. But the remaining allies did not answer to ths summons, remaining at home occupied with their harvest ; and the Lacedaemonians, sufficiently disappointed with this lan- guor and disobedience, were still farther confounded by the unex pected presence of one hundred Athenian triremes off the coast of the isthmus. The Athenians, though their own presence at the Olympic festival was forbidden by the war, had doubtless learned more or less thoroughly the proceedings which had taken place there respecting Mitylene. Perceiving the general belief entertained of their depressed and helpless condition, they deter- mined to contradict this by a great and instant effort, and accord- ingly manned forthwith one hundred triremes, requiring the personal service of all men, citizens as well as metics ; and excepting only the two richest classes of the Solonian census, i. e. the pentakosiomedimni, and the hippeis, or horsemen. With this prodigious fleet they made a demonstration along the isthmus in view of the Lacedaemonians, and landed in various parts of tbe Peloponnesian coast to inflict damage. At the same time, thirty other Athenian triremes, despatched sometime previously to Akarnania, under Asopius, son of Phormio, landed at different openings in Laconia, for the same purpose ; and this news reached the Lacedemonians at the isthmus while the other great Attic--