th their hopes.

The same summer the Megarians in the city, pressed by the hostilities of
the Athenians, who invaded their country twice every year with all their
forces, and harassed by the incursions of their own exiles at Pegae,
who had been expelled in a revolution by the popular party, began to ask
each other whether it would not be better to receive back their exiles,
and free the town from one of its two scourges. The friends of the
emigrants, perceiving the agitation, now more openly than before
demanded the adoption of this proposition; and the leaders of the
commons, seeing that the sufferings of the times had tired out
the constancy of their supporters, entered in their alarm into
correspondence with the Athenian generals, Hippocrates, son of Ariphron,
and Demosthenes, son of Alcisthenes, and resolved to betray the town,
thinking this less dangerous to themselves than the return of the party
which they had banished. It was accordingly arranged that the Athenians
should first take the long walls extending for nearly a mile from the
city to the port of Nisaea, to prevent the Peloponnesians coming to the
rescue from that place, where they formed the sole garrison to secure
the fidelity of Megara; and that after this the attempt should be made
to put into their hands the upper town, which it was thought would then
come over with less difficulty.

The Athenians, after plans had been arranged between themselves and
their correspondents both as to words and actions, sailed by night to
Minoa, the island off Megara, with six hundred heavy infantry under the
command of Hippocrates, and took post in a quarry not far off, out of
which bricks used to be taken for the walls; while Demosthenes, the
other commander, with a detachment of Plataean light troops and another
of Peripoli, placed himself in ambush in the precinct of Enyalius, which
was still nearer. No one knew of it, except those whose business it was
to know that night. A little before daybreak, the traitors in Megara
began to act. Every night for a long time back, under pretence of
marauding, in order to have a means of opening the gates, they had been
used, with the consent of the officer in command, to carry by night a
sculling boat upon a cart along the ditch to the sea, and so to sail
out, bringing it back again before day upon the cart, and taking it
within the wall through the gates, in order, as they pretended, to
baffle the Athenian blockade at Minoa, t