Page:Thucydides, translated into English Vol 1.djvu/218

 BOOK II 1 And now the war between the Athenians and Pelo- oi si^l ponnesians and the alHes of both actually began. Hencetorward the struggle was uninterrupted, and they communicated with one another only by heralds. The narrativ^e is arranged according to summers and winters and follows the order of events. 2 For fourteen years the thirty years' peace which was The Thebans enter concluded after the recovery of Euboea Plataea by night. remained unbroken. But in the fifteenth year, when Chrysis the high-priestess of Argos was in the forty-eighth year of her priesthood, Aenesias being Ephor at Sparta, and at Athens Pythodorus having two months of his archonship to run% in the sixth month after the engagement at Potidaea and at the beginning of spring, about the first watch of the night an armed force of somewhat more than three hundred Thebans entered Plataea, a city of Boeotia, which was an ally of Athens, under the command of two Boeotarchs, Pythangelus the son of Phyleides, and Diemporus the son of Onetorides. They were invited by Naucleides, a Plataean, and his partisans, who opened the gates to them. These men wanted to kill certain citizens of the opposite faction and to make over the city to the Thebans, in the hope of getting the power into their own hands. The intrigue had been conducted by Eurymachus the son of Leontiades, ' For the difficulties attending the chronology see note on the passage.
 * '' Outbreak 0/ the war, . it 1 tt r 11