The Fall of the Athenian Empire-(A New History of the Peloponnesian War) Donald Kagan - (1987)

58 THE FALL OF THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE
in Chios with four ships to find the Chian fleet at Lesbos. Two days
later, adding a Chian ship to his little fleet, he sailed off to join the
main Chian force at Lesbos and to give what help he could. He landed
at Pyrrha, moving on to Eresus the next day. There, he learned that
an Athenian fleet of twenty-five ships under the generals Leon and
Diomedon had landed on Lesbos earlier on the same day as his own
arrival. The Athenians had escaped detection and had taken the enemy
by surprise at Mytilene. They defeated the Chian ships in the harbor,
won a battle on land, and took the main city of Lesbos on the first
assault. Astyochus brought Eresus into rebellion and set out along the
northern coast of the island to try to save the rebellion at Methymna
and to cause one at Antissa. But these efforts failed. Thucydides says
that "everything on Lesbos was going against him," so he embarked
his troops and sailed back to Miletus. Without the support of a fleet,
the land army did not continue on its way to the Hellespont but
dissolved, each allied contingent returning to its own city. 29 The attempt
on Lesbos had failed entirely and with it the plan the Peloponnesians
had formed at Corinth to end the war swiftly by taking
Chios and Lesbos and cutting the Athenian lifeline with an expedition
to the Hellespont. 30 Typical Spartan hesitation had given Athens time
to recover, and the arrival of Leon and Diomedon at Lesbos had turned
the tide for the moment in favor of the Athenians.
The Athenian commanders wasted little time putting matters in
order on Lesbos and turned quickly to the offensive. Their main purpose
was the recovery of Chios, but first they took Clazomenae, a
coastal town not far from it. 31 After returning to Lesbos, they set sail
for the island that had been first to revolt and was still the most active
in bringing other cities into rebellion. Leon and Diomedon seized the
Oenussae islands, just off the northeast point of Chi os, and the fortified
towns of Sidussa and Pteleum on the Erythraean peninsula, on the
mainland just opposite Chios, as nearby bases for conducting a close
see Busolt [GG lib, 1429, n. 3] and Andrewes [HCT IV, 38; V, 43-44, 454-455]).
Whichever view is correct, we should not expect to find the Spartans behaving with
perfect regularity in· sending out new navarchs, for the record shows many
inconsistencies.
29
8.23.5. The reading o Twv i;uf.L[f-1-&xwv] in the papyrus II 24 , as restored by Powell,
is preferable to the reading of the MSS cerro Twv vewv. For supporting arguments, see
HCT V; 53; and Thucydide, La guerre du peloponnese, ed. and trans. R. Weil and J. de
Romilly (Paris, 1972), VIII, I), n. 5·
30
8.8.2.
31
8.2 3 .6.