In Sicily at the beginning of spring Mount Etna erupted and destroyed the territory of Catana. During the spring a combined Syracusan and Locrian force occupied Messana on invitation by the Messanese themselves who wanted to regain control of their city after losing it to the Athenians a few years earlier. Meanwhile the Locrians invaded and devastated the Rhegians’ territory to deter them from getting involved. The Locrian land force then withdrew, but their ships remained to guard Messana.
About the same time Agis led the Peloponnesians and their allies in their annual invasion of Attica. Athens sent Sophocles and Eurymedon with the rest of the forty ships to Sicily. On the way they were to support the democrats in Corcyra who were being plundered by exiles who were living in the mountains; Sparta had recently sent sixty ships to support the oligarchs. Demosthenes had permission to use the Athenian fleet, if he wished, to attack coastal areas of the Peloponnese.
Pylos was on the west coast of Messenia at the north end of Navarino Bay, at the head of a rocky peninsula called Coryphasium (=Palaiokastro) separated in the south from Sphacteria (a narrow island lying across the mouth of the bay) by the Sikia Channel. On the landward side is the ‘Cave of Nestor’; modern Pylos is at the southern end of the bay.
During a storm the Athenians stopped at Pylos and began to build fortifications on the headland. When the ships continued northwards, Demosthenes stayed behind with some men. The Spartans recalled their army from Attica (their invasion thus became a very short one, lasting only fifteen days) and summoned their ships from Corcyra; Demosthenes recalled the Athenian ships, which had reached Zacynthus. The Spartan ships arrived first and attacked by land and sea. After a number of the attacks failed (Brasidas was injured in one of them) the Spartans landed 420 troops on the north end of Sphacteria opposite Pylos. When the Athenian ships arrived the Spartan ships were defeated and the Spartans on the island were trapped. A truce was quickly arranged, the chief conditions being that the Athenians permitted the delivery of food to the men on the island and the Spartans placed their entire fleet of warships into the hands of the Athenians, but in the Athenian Assembly the negotiations were wrecked by Cleon.
At Pylos the Athenians alleged an infringement by Sparta of the terms of the truce and kept the entire Spartan fleet of sixty vessels. Demosthenes attempted to starve out the Spartans on Sphacteria but was unable to blockade the island tightly enough. It thus became apparent that an assault on the island would have to be made before the winter’s choppy seas forced a lifting of the siege.
At Athens, Cleon criticised Nicias, strategos for 425 BC, for the inaction at Sphacteria. Unexpectedly, Nicias resigned his command and offered it to Cleon, who had little choice but to accept the generalship and then boasted he would bring back the Spartans within twenty days, alive or dead. He went off with a number of hoplites, peltasts and archers to Pylos. Before his arrival a fire, started by chance and fanned by the wind, had burnt most of the cover on the island to reveal the number and disposition of the defenders. Demosthenes, on whose generalship Cleon was obviously going to rely, had already made his preparations.
Landing at dawn he sent in his light-armed men to harass the Spartans and kept his hoplites out of reach (Peloponnesian cavalry would have normally kept the light-armed troops away, but Sparta had no cavalry on Sphacteria). The Spartans blinded by clouds of wood-ash from the recent fires eventually withdrew to a rough fort until some Messenians climbed some cliffs and turned the position. The Spartans were invited to surrender. After obtaining orders from the mainland the Spartans capitulated. Within twenty days of his departure (as he had earlier promised) Cleon was back in Athens with 282 prisoners, of whom some 120 were Spartiates.
At this time the population of the Equals had been so reduced that the Spartans viewed the loss of 120 Spartiates as being unacceptable. The Spartan leaders therefore offered favourable peace terms in exchange for the captives, which at Cleon’s urging the Athenians declined. The Athenians threatened to kill the hostages if a Spartan set foot on Attic soil and the annual invasions were halted until 413 BC. At Pylos the Athenians installed Messenians from Naupactus, whence they raided inland and encouraged the helots to desert.
From Pylos, Eurymedon and Sophocles sailed with the fleet on its way to Sicily. At Corcyra they helped the democrats to capture the oligarchs’ stronghold. The garrison surrendered on condition that their fate would be decided by the Athenian people. But the oligarchs were tricked into breaking the terms of the agreement (that they would not try to escape) and the Athenian generals handed them over to the democrats, who butchered them to a man.
Later in the summer the Athenians made an attack on the territory of Corinth with eighty ships, two thousand Athenian infantry and two hundred cavalry, accompanied by allied contingents, commanded by Nicias and two other strategoi. They had sailed by night to achieve surprise, but the Corinthians had been alerted and had come to the Isthmus. The Athenians at daybreak landed on a beach overlooked by the hilltop village of Solygia, southeast of Corinth. About half of the Corinthian army commanded by Lycophron attacked the Athenian right wing. The advantage shifted back and forth until the Athenian cavalry (Corinthians had none) broke the deadlock.
The Corinthian left wing retreated to the hill. Lycophron was killed during this near rout. The rest of the line retreated in good order and took up a defensive position on higher ground. Meanwhile the rest of the Corinthian army was approaching from the north, and reinforcements from Corinth were coming from the west. The Athenians took to their ships and crossed to the islands opposite. The fleet then proceeded to raid several other places on the Peloponnesian coast of the Saronic Gulf, but made its only permanent incursion at the promontory of Methana, where they built a wall across and fortified the isthmus as a base from which the Argolic Peninsula could subsequently be invaded.
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