In the spring Archidamus led the first Peloponnesian invasion into Attica. After failing to take the fortress of Oenoe on the Boeotia/Attica border he advanced to Eleusis and started to devastate the area. He then proceeded to Acharnae, the most heavily populated suburb of Athens, where the ravaging of the land by his soldiers was visible from the city walls.
Archidamus was clearly trying to provoke the Athenians into fighting a pitched battle. The people were angry and many of them, especially the Acharnians, wanted to go out and fight. Pericles was criticised, but he remained firm. He mollified at least some by using the cavalry to harass Peloponnesians who approached too near the city. He also sent a fleet of one hundred ships to attack the coasts of the Peloponnese. These raids were successful except at Methone on the southwest coast of Messenia, where a young Spartan officer named Brasidas (c.472-422 BC) entered the walled town and saved it from capture.
During the year the Athenians invaded Aegina, an island in the Saronic Gulf, off the coast of the Peloponnese. A Peloponnesian fleet based on Aegina would threaten Piraeus and tie down a large part of the Athenian fleet in defence. The Athenians therefore expelled the entire population of Aegina and resettled the island with colonists of their own. The Spartans in their turn relocated the exiles in Thyrea, a borderland between Laconia and Argolis.
After about a month in Attica the provisions of the Peloponnesian army were exhausted. Archidamus, realising that the Athenians would neither fight nor yield, moved eastwards to ravage the area between mounts Parnes and Pentelicus, and then returned home by way of Boeotia.
Later in the summer Pericles led the full Athenian force of thirteen thousand hoplites into the territory of Megara, which was laid waste from end to end. This excursion was repeated annually for the next seven years but, like so many assaults against fortified cities at this time, it failed (as did the attack on Epidaurus the following year). In the winter Pericles delivered his monumental and emotional funeral oration, honouring the Athenians who had died for their city.
In the spring Phormion had arrived in Thrace with sixteen hundred hoplites and then completed the blockade of Potidaea by building a counter-wall on the Pallene side (south). With Potidaea firmly besieged, Phormion led his men, in this year and the following year, in successful campaigns against Athens’ enemies in Chalcidice. The Thracian king Sitalces (r.431-424 BC), son of Teres-I, had enlarged his kingdom by successful wars and it now comprised the whole territory from Abdera in the south, to the Danube in the north and to the Strymon in the west. In the summer Nymphodorus of Abdera (c.450-400 BC) arranged an alliance between Athens and Sitalces. Nymphodorus also reconciled the Macedonian king Perdiccas II (r.c.454-c.413 BC) to the Athenians in exchange for the town of Therma at the head of the Thermaic Gulf, which they had taken in 432 BC.
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