(the old inhabitants being sometimes removed to make room for others);
never was there so much banishing and blood-shedding, now on the field
of battle, now in the strife of faction. Old stories of occurrences
handed down by tradition, but scantily confirmed by experience,
suddenly ceased to be incredible; there were earthquakes of
unparalleled extent and violence; eclipses of the sun occurred with
a frequency unrecorded in previous history; there were great
droughts in sundry places and consequent famines, and that most
calamitous and awfully fatal visitation, the plague. All this came
upon them with the late war, which was begun by the Athenians and
Peloponnesians by the dissolution of the thirty years' truce made
after the conquest of Euboea. To the question why they broke the
treaty, I answer by placing first an account of their grounds of
complaint and points of difference, that no one may ever have to ask
the immediate cause which plunged the Hellenes into a war of such
magnitude. The real cause I consider to be the one which was
formally most kept out of sight. The growth of the power of Athens,
and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war
inevitable. Still it is well to give the grounds alleged by either
side which led to the dissolution of the treaty and the breaking out
of the war.




CHAPTER II

_Causes of the War - The Affair of Epidamnus -
The Affair of Potidaea_