Persians perished; and
the victory was rendered still more decisive by the burning of the
fleet.

The Grecian fleet now sailed towards the Hellespont with the view of
destroying the bridge; but hearing that it no longer existed,
Leotychides departed homewards with the Peloponnesian vessels.
Xanthippus however, the Athenian commander, seized the opportunity to
recover from the Persians the Thracian Chersonese, which had long been
an Athenian possession; and proceeded to blockade Sestos, the key of
the strait. This city surrendered in the autumn, after a protracted
siege, whereupon the Athenians returned home, carrying with them the
cables of the bridge across the Hellespont, which were afterwards
preserved in the Acropolis as a trophy.

CHAPTER IX.

FROM THE END OF THE PERSIAN WARS TO THE BEGINNING OF THE PELOPONNESIAN
WAR, B.C. 479-431.

The Athenians, on their return to Attica, after the defeat of the
Persians, found their city ruined and their country desolate. They
began to rebuild their city on a larger scale than before, and to
fortify it with a wall. Those allies to whom the increasing maritime
power of Athens was an object of suspicion, and especially the
AEginetans, to whom it was more particularly formidable, beheld her
rising fortifications with dismay. They endeavoured to inspire the
Lacedaemonians with their fears, and urged them to arrest the work.
But though Sparta shared the jealousy of the allies, she could not with
any decency interfere by force to prevent a friendly city from
exercising a right inherent in all independent states. She assumed
therefore the hypocritical garb of an adviser and counsellor.
Concealing her jealousy under the pretence of zeal for the common
interests of Greece, she represented to the Athenians that, in the
event of another Persian invasion, fortified towns would serve the
enemy for camps and strongholds, as Thebes had done in the last war;
and proposed that the Athenians should not only desist from completing
their own fortifications, but help to demolish those which already
existed in other towns.

The object of the proposal was too transparent to deceive so acute a
statesman as Themistocles. Athens was not yet, however, in a condition
to incur the danger of openly rejecting it; and he therefore advised
the Athenians to dismiss the Spartan envoys with the assurance that
they would send ambassadors to Sparta to explain their views. He then
caused himself to