16.
But when also this other overthrow happened to the Athenians at Amphipolis, and that both Cleon and Brasidas were slain, the which on either side were most opposite to the peace, the one for that he had good success and honour in the war, the other because in quiet times his evil actions would more appear and his calumniations be the less believed, those two that in the two states aspired most to be chief, Pleistoanax, the son of Pausanias, and Nicias, the son of Niceratus, who in military charges had been the most fortunate of his time, did most of all other desire to have the peace go forward.
Nicias because he was desirous, having hitherto never been overthrown, to carry his good fortune through and to give both himself and the city rest from their troubles for the present, and for the future to leave a name that in all his time he had never made the commonwealth miscarry;
which he thought might be done by standing out of danger and by putting himself as little as he might into the hands of fortune;
and to stand out of danger is the benefit of peace.
Pleistoanax had the same desire because of the imputation laid upon him about his return from exile by his enemies, that suggested unto the Lacedaemonians upon every loss they received that the same befell them for having, contrary to the law, repealed his banishment.
[2]
For they charged him further that he and his brother Aristocles had suborned the prophetess of Delphi to answer the deputies of the Lacedaemonians, when they came thither, most commonly with this: that they should bring back the seed of the semigod, the son of Jupiter, out of a strange country into his own;
and that if they did not, they should plough their land with a silver plough;
[3]
and so at length to have made the Lacedaemonians, nineteen years after, with such dances and sacrifices as they who were the first founders of Lacedaemon had ordained to be used at the enthroning of their kings, to fetch him home again;
who lived in the meantime in exile in the mountain Lycaeum, in a house whereof the one half was part of the temple of Jupiter, for fear of the Lacedaemonians, as being suspected to have taken a bribe to withdraw his army out of Attica.
The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Thucydides. Thomas Hobbes. translator. London. Bohn. 1843.
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