118.
Not long afterwards occurred the affairs of Corcyra and Potidaea, which have been
already1 narrated, and the various other circumstances which led to the Peloponnesian
War.
[2]
Fifty years elapsed between the retreat of Xerxes and the beginning of the war; during
these years took place all those operations of the Hellenes against one another and
against the Barbarian which I have been describing.
The Athenians acquired a firmer hold over their empire
and the city itself became a
great power.
The Lacedaemonians saw what was going on,
but during most of the time they remained
inactive and hardly attempted to interfere. They had never been of a temper prompt to take the field unless they were compelled;
and they were in some degree embarrassed by wars near home. But the Athenians were growing too great to be ignored and were laying hands on their
allies.
They could now bear it no longer: they made up their minds that they must put out all
their strength and overthrow the Athenian power by force of arms. And therefore they commenced the Peloponnesian War.
[3]
They had already voted in their own assembly that the treaty had been broken and that
the Athenians were guilty2; they now sent to Delphi and asked the God if it would be for their advantage to
make war.
He is reported to have answered that, if they did their best, they would be conquerors,
and that he himself, invited or uninvited, would take their part.
Thucydides translated into English; with introduction, marginal analysis, notes, and indices. Volume 1. Thucydides. Benjamin Jowett. translator. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1881.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.