Summer [V 25–35]

After the treaty and the alliance were made between the Spartans and the Athenians at the end of the ten-year war, in the ephorate of Pleistolas and the archonship of Alcaeus, there was peace among the parties that accepted these agreements; but the Corinthians and some of the cities in the Peloponnese tried to destabilise the arrangements, and that immediately led to further disturbance in the relations between Sparta and her allies. And as time passed the Spartans began to arouse the suspicions of the Athenians too, by not implementing some of the specific provisions from the agreements. For six years and ten months the two sides refrained from invading one another's territory, but elsewhere the truce failed to hold firm and they inflicted as much damage on each other as possible; and then they were finally driven to break the treaty concluded after the ten-year war and reverted again to open warfare.

The same Thucydides of Athens has written down these events too, setting them out in sequence by winters and summers, down to the time when the Spartans and their allies put an end to Athenian rule and captured the long walls and the Peiraeus. At that point the war had lasted a total of twenty-seven years. As for the agreement that intervened in the middle, one would be quite wrong to think that this period did not count as a state of war. For looked at carefully in the light of the relevant facts it will be seen that one cannot describe as ‘peace’ a situation in which the two sides neither restored nor received back everything that had been agreed by treaty; and quite apart from that, there were violations of the treaty on both sides in the Mantinean and Epidaurian conflicts among others, the allies in Thrace remained just as hostile to Athens, and the Boeotians were observing a truce which only lasted ten days at a time.