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When the Athenians heard1 of the destruction of their armaments, they abandoned the policy of control of the sea, but busied themselves with putting the walls in order and with blocking the harbours, expecting, as well they might, that they would be besieged. [2] For at once the kings of the Lacedaemonians, Agis and Pausanias, invaded Attica with a large army and pitched their camp before the walls, and Lysander with more than two hundred triremes put in at the Peiraeus. Although they were in the grip of such hard trials, the Athenians nevertheless held out and had no trouble defending their city for some time. [3] And the Peloponnesians decided, since the siege was offering difficulties, to withdraw their armies from Attica and to conduct a blockade at a distance with their ships, in order that no grain should come to the inhabitants. [4] When this was done, the Athenians came into dire want of everything, but especially of food, because this had always come to them by sea. Since the suffering increased day by day, the city was filled with dead, and the survivors sent ambassadors and concluded peace with the Lacedaemonians on the terms that they should tear down the two long walls and those of the Peiraeus, keep no more than ten ships of war, withdraw from all the cities, and recognize the hegemony of the Lacedaemonians. [5] And so the Peloponnesian War, the most protracted of any of which we have knowledge, having run for twenty-seven years, came to the end we have described.

1 Xenophon, who was in Athens on the occasion, tells how the news came (Xen. Hell. 2.2.3). "It was at night that the Paralus arrived at Athens with tidings of the disaster, and a sound of wailing ran from Piraeus through the long walls to the city, one man passing on the news to another; and during that night no one slept. . . ." (Tr. of Brownson in the L.C.L.).

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