Page:History of Greece Vol VII.djvu/81

63 ALKIBIADES IN i'ELOl'ONNESUS. G3 man ardor into a different channel. Full of antipathy to Sparta, he regarded the interior of Peloponnesus as her most vulnerable point, especially in the present disjointed relations of its compo- nent cities. Moreover, his personal thirst for glory was better gratified amidst the centre of Grecian life than by undertaking an expedition into a distant and barbarous region : lastly, he probably recollected with discomfort the hardships and extreme cold, insupportable to all except the iron frame of Sokrates, which he had himself endured at the blockade of Potida^a twelve years before, 1 and which any armament destined to conquer Amphipolis would have to go through again. It wjvs under these impressions that he now began to press his intra-Peloponnesian operations against Lacedasmon, with the view of organizing a counter-alliance under Argos sufficient to keep her in check, and at any rate to nullify her power of carrying invasion beyond the Isthmus. All this was to be done without ostensibly break- ing the peace and alliance between Athens and Lacedasmon, which stood in conspicuous letters on pillars erected in both cities. Coming to Argos at the hd d of a few Athenian hoplites and bowmen, and reinforced by Peloponnesian allies, Alkibiades ex- hibited the spectacle of an Athenian general traversing the interior of the peninsula, and imposing his own arrangements in Carious quarters, a spectacle at that moment new and striking. 2 He first turned his attention to the Achaean towns in the north- west, where he persuaded the inhabitants of Patraa to ally them- selves with Athens, and even to undertake the labor of connecting their town with the sea by means of long walls, so as to place themselves within the protection of Athens from seaward. He farther projected the erection of a fort and the formation of a naval station at the extreme point of Cape Rhium, just at the narrow entrance of the Corinthian gulf; whereby the Athenians, who already f ossessed the opposite shore by means of Naupak- tus, would have become masters of the commerce of the gulf. 1 llato, Symposion. c. 35, p. 220. tieivol ydp avTo&i ^a/zuvec, ~uyov otov IftvOTarav, etc. pedition of Alkibiades in his usual loose and exaggerated language : bat he hap a right to call attention to it as something very memorable at the time
 * Thucyd. v, 52. Isokrates (Do Bigis, sect. 17, p. 349) speaks of this ex-