BOOK    IL
 

II. I.        And   now   the   war  between   the   Athenians   and B.C. 431.

01 87 2
Outbreak    PcloponncsIans and the allies of both actually began.

of the war.  Hcnccforward the struggle was uninterrupted, and they

communicated with one another only by heralds.    The

narrative is arranged according to summers and winters

and follows the order of events.

2.           For fourteen years the thirty years' peace which was

The The-    concludcd after the recovery of Euboea remained un-

piataeaby  broken.     But In the fifteenth year, when Chrysis  the
 

night.
 

high-priestess of Argos was In the forty-eighth year of
her priesthood, Aeneslas being Ephor at Sparta, and at
Athens Pythodorus having two months of his archon-
ship 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 com¬
mand of two Boeotarchs, Pythangelus the son of Phy-
leides, 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 con¬
ducted by Eurymachus the son of Leontiades, one of
the chief citizens of Thebes. There was an old quarrel
between the two cities, and the Thebans, seeing that war