onger able
to hold out against their besiegers. The inroads of the Peloponnesians
into Attica had not had the desired effect of making the Athenians raise
the siege. Provisions there were none left; and so far had distress for
food gone in Potidaea that, besides a number of other horrors, instances
had even occurred of the people having eaten one another. In this
extremity they at last made proposals for capitulating to the
Athenian generals in command against them--Xenophon, son of Euripides,
Hestiodorus, son of Aristocleides, and Phanomachus, son of Callimachus.
The generals accepted their proposals, seeing the sufferings of the army
in so exposed a position; besides which the state had already spent two
thousand talents upon the siege. The terms of the capitulation were as
follows: a free passage out for themselves, their children, wives and
auxiliaries, with one garment apiece, the women with two, and a fixed
sum of money for their journey. Under this treaty they went out
to Chalcidice and other places, according as was their power. The
Athenians, however, blamed the generals for granting terms without
instructions from home, being of opinion that the place would have had
to surrender at discretion. They afterwards sent settlers of their own
to Potidaea, and colonized it. Such were the events of the winter,
and so ended the second year of this war of which Thucydides was the
historian.

CHAPTER VIII

_Third Year of the War--Investment of Plataea--Naval Victories of
Phormio--Thracian Irruption into Macedonia under Sitalces_

The next summer the Peloponnesians and their allies, instead of invading
Attica, marched against Plataea, under the command of Archidamus, son of
Zeuxidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians. He had encamped his army and
was about to lay waste the country, when the Plataeans hastened to send
envoys to him, and spoke as follows: "Archidamus and Lacedaemonians,
in invading the Plataean territory, you do what is wrong in itself,
and worthy neither of yourselves nor of the fathers who begot you.
Pausanias, son of Cleombrotus, your countryman, after freeing Hellas
from the Medes with the help of those Hellenes who were willing to
undertake the risk of the battle fought near our city, offered sacrifice
to Zeus the Liberator in the marketplace of Plataea, and calling all the
allies together restored to the Plataeans their city and territory, and
declared it independent and inviolate against aggression