from Euboea, which had before been
carried on so much more quickly overland by Decelea from Oropus, was now
effected at great cost by sea round Sunium; everything the city required
had to be imported from abroad, and instead of a city it became a
fortress. Summer and winter the Athenians were worn out by having to
keep guard on the fortifications, during the day by turns, by night all
together, the cavalry excepted, at the different military posts or upon
the wall. But what most oppressed them was that they had two wars at
once, and had thus reached a pitch of frenzy which no one would have
believed possible if he had heard of it before it had come to pass.
For could any one have imagined that even when besieged by the
Peloponnesians entrenched in Attica, they would still, instead of
withdrawing from Sicily, stay on there besieging in like manner
Syracuse, a town (taken as a town) in no way inferior to Athens, or
would so thoroughly upset the Hellenic estimate of their strength and
audacity, as to give the spectacle of a people which, at the beginning
of the war, some thought might hold out one year, some two, none more
than three, if the Peloponnesians invaded their country, now seventeen
years after the first invasion, after having already suffered from all
the evils of war, going to Sicily and undertaking a new war nothing
inferior to that which they already had with the Peloponnesians? These
causes, the great losses from Decelea, and the other heavy charges that
fell upon them, produced their financial embarrassment; and it was at
this time that they imposed upon their subjects, instead of the tribute,
the tax of a twentieth upon all imports and exports by sea, which they
thought would bring them in more money; their expenditure being now not
the same as at first, but having grown with the war while their revenues
decayed.

Accordingly, not wishing to incur expense in their present want of
money, they sent back at once the Thracians who came too late for
Demosthenes, under the conduct of Diitrephes, who was instructed, as
they were to pass through the Euripus, to make use of them if possible
in the voyage alongshore to injure the enemy. Diitrephes first landed
them at Tanagra and hastily snatched some booty; he then sailed across
the Euripus in the evening from Chalcis in Euboea and disembarking in
Boeotia led them against Mycalessus. The night he passed unobserved
near the temple of Hermes, not quite two miles from