Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/433

 DISMAY AT ATHENS. 41 1 He hoped to be in time for saving Amphipolis, but the place had surrendered a few hours before. He arrived, indeed, only just in time to preserve Eion ; for parties in that town were already beginning to concert the admission of Brasidas, who would prob- ably have entered it at daybreak the next morning. Thucydides, putting the place in a condition of defence, successfully repelled an attack which Brasidas made both by land and by boats on the river. He at the same time received and provided for the Athenian citizens who were retiring from Amphipolis. 1 The capture of this city, perhaps the most important of all the foreign possessions of Athens, and the opening of the bridge over the Strymon, by which even all her eastern allies became approachable by land, occasioned prodigious emotion through- out all the Grecian world. The dismay felt at Athens 2 was greater than had been ever before experienced : hope and joy prevailed among her enemies, and excitement and new aspira tions became widely spread among her subject-allies. The bloody defeat at Delium, and the unexpected conquests of Brasi- das, now again lowered the prestige of Athenian success, six- teen months after it had been so powerfully exalted by the cap- ture of Sphakteria. The loss of reputation which Sparta had then incurred, was now compensated by a reaction against the unfounded terrors since conceived about the probable career of her enemy. It was not merely the loss of Amphipolis, serious as that was, which distressed the Athenians, but also their insecurity respecting the maintenance of their whole mpire : they knew not which of their subject-allies might next revolt, in contemplation of aid from Brasidas, facilitated by the newly-acquired Strymonian bridge. And as the proceedings of 1 Thucyd. iv, 105, 106 ; Diodor. xii, 68. 2 Thucyd. iv, 108. 'E^o/iev?^ tie rfc 'A/^Tro/lewf, oi 'Aftyvaloi cf fiej-a 6 of K.aTaTi]aav, etc. The prodigious importance of the site of Amphipolis, with its adjoining hridge forming the communication between the regions east and west of the Strymon, was felt not only by Philip of Macedon, as will hereafter appear, but also by the Eomans after their conquest of Macedonia. Of the four regions into which the Romans distributed Macedonia, " pars prima (says Livy, xlv, 30) habet opportunitatem Amphipoleos ; quae oljecU claudit omnes ab oriente sole in Macedonian! aditus."