Archidamus was succeeded by his eldest son Agis II (r.427-401 BC). In the summer the Peloponnesians set out to invade Attica but when they reached the Isthmus a succession of earthquakes was taken as an unfavourable omen and the invasion did not take place.
At Mytilene with no help coming from the Peloponnesians the oligarchs, on the advice of a Spartan envoy Salaethus, armed the common people with a view to making a sortie. But the people on being armed demanded the distribution of any remaining food and forced the oligarchs to surrender to the Athenian commander Paches, who after occupying Mytilene with his troops, sent Salaethus and about a thousand men implicated in the revolt as prisoners to Athens.
About seven days after the city’s surrender forty-two Peloponnesian ships, commanded by the Spartan Alcidas, reached the coast of Ionia at Erythrae. Instead of attacking Paches’ army at Mytilene or seizing a base in Ionia with a view to raising a revolt as his advisors suggested, Alcidas withdrew to Ephesus and then fled southwestwards for the Peloponnese.
Alcidas and his small fleet had accomplished very little in military terms, but the freedom with which it moved about the Aegean, which the Athenians had come to regard as their private lake, threw a fright into them. In their anger they had Salaethus killed immediately and ordered the killing of all adult Mytilenean males and the sale of the rest of the population into slavery. But a second Assembly was called to reconsider the decision. Cleon, who had advocated the punishment at the first assembly, opposed any amelioration of the earlier sentence. His chief opponent, Diodotus, maintained that such terrorist methods would not prevent any subject state from rebelling but only prolong resistance. The decision was reversed and only the ringleaders of the revolt were executed, but the lands of the rebels were confiscated and divided among Athenian colonists.
Soon after the reduction of Lesbos the Plataeans finally surrendered to the Spartans. Their supplies were exhausted and they trusted the Spartans when they offered to ‘judge them all fairly’ if they yielded. But when the question was put to each defender whether he had rendered assistance to the Spartan Alliance in the war, all of them had to answer ‘no’. Over two hundred men, including twenty-five Athenians, were put to death, and all the women were sold into slavery. When the Spartans eventually turned Plataea over to Thebes, the city was levelled and land divided among its citizens.
Civil strife broke out in Corcyra, a state that could swing the balance of naval power in the west and was therefore of great importance to Athens and Sparta. Bloodshed began when the oligarchs burst into the council and assassinated sixty of their opponents. When some Spartan envoys arrived the oligarchs, encouraged by their presence, attacked the democrats. During the fighting the oligarchs armed their slaves, set fire to parts of the city, and fought the democrats in a battle that ended only when twelve Athenian ships carrying four hundred Messenian hoplites arrived.
A few days later a Peloponnesian fleet of fifty-three ships commanded by Alcidas, to whom Brasidas was attached as an advisor, advanced at dawn towards Corcyra. The Corcyreans manned sixty vessels and sailed out to meet them, but their crews fought among themselves, two ships deserted and thirteen ships were captured. Alcidas learnt that an Athenian fleet was approaching and escaped unobserved. When the Athenian fleet of sixty ships arrived, the democrats began to hunt down and murder every oligarch. Later they returned and waged a guerrilla war for two years until the Athenian fleet again intervened.
In the summer Nicias captured the island of Minoa from which Nisaea, the port of Megara, was effectively blockaded. Late in the summer Athens sent Laches (c.475-418 BC) and Charoeades with twenty ships to Sicily to help her allies in their war against Syracuse. For allies, the Syracusans had all the Dorian cities except Camarina; the Leontines had Camarina and the Chalcidian cities. In Italy the Epizephyrian Locrians were for Syracuse; the Rhegians for their Leontine kinsmen. When Charoeades died in 426 BC, Laches took over the command of the fleet and captured the cities of Mylae and Messana, thus gaining control of the Messana Strait.
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