Latin
Lines 1.16-1.17
Greek and Roman Historians, The Peloponnesian War 1.16-17
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The second year of the war, 430, began with another invasion of Attica. Thucydides, having scarcely brought the Peloponnesians into Attica, switches styles dramatically to record the outbreak of a dreadful plague at Athens. Although it cannot be securely identified with any known disease, this plague carried off one-third of the 14,000 hoplites and cavalry (there was a recurrence in 427). Pericles himself came down with the disease and died in 429, not, however, before leading a ravaging expedition against Epidaurus and other Peloponnesian places and defending himself against his critics. The speech Thucydides gives him for this occasion is as fine as the funeral speech, which has received so much more attention. It hints loftily at expansion to east and west of the kind that Pericles' initial strategy had appeared to rule out. It is possible that this speech is historical and that the purpose of attacking Epidaurus was to bar Corinth's eastern sea-lanes completely; Aegina had already been evacuated and repopulated by cleruchs in 430, perhaps as an initial step toward this end. In the north, Potidaea surrendered, and a cleruchy was installed here too, a further Corinthian setback.
Peloponnesian pressure on Plataea was stepped up in 429. A large expedition in the northwest under the Spartan Cnemus, who used barbarian as well as Greek forces in an effort to win back some of Corinth's losses, showed that there were adventurous thinkers before the northern operations of Brasidas later in the decade. It was, however, a failure, as was a Peloponnesian embassy to Persia asking for money and alliance. Intercepted by the king of the Odrysians, the ambassadors were handed over to Athens, where they were put to death with no pretense at trial. The Odrysians feature prominently at this time (but perhaps Thucydides' own family interests in Thrace have distorted the picture): the mass mobilization of a large Odrysian force, ostensibly in the Athenian interest, soon afterward caused general terror in Greece, but it came to nothing. There was more concrete encouragement for Athens in some naval successes of the great commander Phormion in the Gulf of Corinth.