14.
Presently after the battle of Amphipolis and return of Ramphias out of Thessaly, it fell out that neither side did any act of war but were inclined rather to a peace;
the Athenians for the blow they had received at Delium, and this other a little after at Amphipolis, and because they had no longer that confident hope in their strength on which they relied when formerly they refused the peace, as having conceived upon their present success that they should have had the upper hand;
[2]
also they stood in fear of their own confederates, lest emboldened by these losses of theirs they should more and more revolt;
and repented that they made not the peace after their happy success at Pylus, when occasion was offered to have done it honourably;
[3]
and the Lacedaemonians on the other side did desire peace because the war had not proceeded as they expected;
for they had thought they should in a few years have warred down the power of Athens by wasting their territory;
and because they were fallen into that calamity in the island, the like whereof had never happened unto Sparta before;
because also their country was continually ravaged by those of Pylus and Cythera, and their Helotes continually fled to the enemy;
and because they feared lest those which remained, trusting in them that were run away, should in this estate of theirs raise some innovation, as at other times before they had done.
[4]
Withal it happened that the thirty years' peace with the Argives was now upon the point of expiring;
and the Argives would not renew it without restitution made them of Cynuria;
so that to war against the Argives and the Athenians, both at once, seemed impossible.
They suspected also that some of the cities of Peloponnesus would revolt to the Argives, as indeed it came afterwards to pass.
The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Thucydides. Thomas Hobbes. translator. London. Bohn. 1843.
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