[6]
Later we went to war on account of Aegina1; and after both sides had suffered heavily, we were seized once more with a desire for peace. So a deputation of ten —among them my grandfather, Andocides — was chosen from the whole citizen body and dispatched to Sparta with unlimited powers to negotiate a peace. They arranged a thirty years' peace with Sparta for us. That is a long period, gentlemen; yet did the democracy ever fall in the course of it? Was any party, I ask you, ever caught plotting a revolution? No one can point to an instance. In fact just the opposite happened.
1 There is bad confusion here. Aegina lost her independence and was incorporated in the Athenian empire in 457. Under the Thirty Years' Peace of 446 she was guaranteed autonomy on condition that she continued to pay tribute. In 432, she made secret overtures to Sparta, alleging that her autonomy had not been respected. Thus Andocides may be thinking of her share in precipitating the Archidamian War. On the other hand, the peace which follows is not the Peace of Nicias; when talking of the benefits which ensued from it, Andocides seems to be referring once again to the Thirty Years' Peace （see Andoc. 3.3）. Probably he is thinking of the peace of 446, and assumes that because the status of Aegina figured prominently in the negotiations, it was Aegina which had originally sent Athens to war.
Andocides. Minor Attic Orators in two volumes 1, Antiphon Andocides, with an English translation by K. J. Maidment, M.A. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1968.
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