Acarnania, occupied the place.

Summer was now over. During the winter ensuing, Aristides, son of
Archippus, one of the commanders of the Athenian ships sent to collect
money from the allies, arrested at Eion, on the Strymon, Artaphernes,
a Persian, on his way from the King to Lacedaemon. He was conducted
to Athens, where the Athenians got his dispatches translated from the
Assyrian character and read them. With numerous references to other
subjects, they in substance told the Lacedaemonians that the King did
not know what they wanted, as of the many ambassadors they had sent him
no two ever told the same story; if however they were prepared to speak
plainly they might send him some envoys with this Persian. The Athenians
afterwards sent back Artaphernes in a galley to Ephesus, and ambassadors
with him, who heard there of the death of King Artaxerxes, son of
Xerxes, which took place about that time, and so returned home.

The same winter the Chians pulled down their new wall at the command of
the Athenians, who suspected them of meditating an insurrection, after
first however obtaining pledges from the Athenians, and security as far
as this was possible for their continuing to treat them as before. Thus
the winter ended, and with it ended the seventh year of this war of
which Thucydides is the historian.

In first days of the next summer there was an eclipse of the sun at the
time of new moon, and in the early part of the same month an earthquake.
Meanwhile, the Mitylenian and other Lesbian exiles set out, for the
most part from the continent, with mercenaries hired in Peloponnese, and
others levied on the spot, and took Rhoeteum, but restored it without
injury on the receipt of two thousand Phocaean staters. After this they
marched against Antandrus and took the town by treachery, their plan
being to free Antandrus and the rest of the Actaean towns, formerly
owned by Mitylene but now held by the Athenians. Once fortified there,
they would have every facility for ship-building from the vicinity
of Ida and the consequent abundance of timber, and plenty of other
supplies, and might from this base easily ravage Lesbos, which was
not far off, and make themselves masters of the Aeolian towns on the
continent.

While these were the schemes of the exiles, the Athenians in the same
summer made an expedition with sixty ships, two thousand heavy infantry,
a few cavalry, and some allied troops from Miletus and other parts,
aga