voting); the fact being that he wished to make them declare their
opinion openly and thus to increase their ardour for war. Accordingly
he said: "All Lacedaemonians who are of opinion that the treaty has
been broken, and that Athens is guilty, leave your seats and go there,"
pointing out a certain place; "all who are of the opposite opinion,
there." They accordingly stood up and divided; and those who held that
the treaty had been broken were in a decided majority. Summoning the
allies, they told them that their opinion was that Athens had been
guilty of injustice, but that they wished to convoke all the allies and
put it to the vote; in order that they might make war, if they decided
to do so, on a common resolution. Having thus gained their point, the
delegates returned home at once; the Athenian envoys a little later,
when they had dispatched the objects of their mission. This decision of
the assembly, judging that the treaty had been broken, was made in the
fourteenth year of the thirty years' truce, which was entered into after
the affair of Euboea.

The Lacedaemonians voted that the treaty had been broken, and that the
war must be declared, not so much because they were persuaded by the
arguments of the allies, as because they feared the growth of the power
of the Athenians, seeing most of Hellas already subject to them.

CHAPTER IV

_From the end of the Persian to the beginning of the Peloponnesian
War--The Progress from Supremacy to Empire_

The way in which Athens came to be placed in the circumstances under
which her power grew was this. After the Medes had returned from Europe,
defeated by sea and land by the Hellenes, and after those of them who
had fled with their ships to Mycale had been destroyed, Leotychides,
king of the Lacedaemonians, the commander of the Hellenes at Mycale,
departed home with the allies from Peloponnese. But the Athenians and
the allies from Ionia and Hellespont, who had now revolted from the
King, remained and laid siege to Sestos, which was still held by the
Medes. After wintering before it, they became masters of the place on
its evacuation by the barbarians; and after this they sailed away from
Hellespont to their respective cities. Meanwhile the Athenian people,
after the departure of the barbarian from their country, at once
proceeded to carry over their children and wives, and such property
as they had left, from the places where they had deposited them, and
prepared