After the close of the year Theopompus was archon in Athens and the Romans elected in place of consuls four military tribunes, Tiberius Postumius, Gaius Cornelius, Gaius Valerius, and Caeso Fabius. At this time the Athenians dissolved the oligarchy of the Four Hundred and formed the constitution of the government from the citizens at large.2 [2] The author of all these changes was Theramenes, a man who was orderly in his manner of life and was reputed to surpass all others in judgement; for he was the only person to advise the recall from exile of Alcibiades, through whom the Athenians recovered themselves, and since he was the author of many other measures for the benefit of his country, he was the recipient of no small approbation. [3]
But these events took place at a little later time, and for the war the Athenians appointed Thrasyllus and Thrasybulus generals, who collected the fleet at Samos and trained the soldiers for battle at sea, giving them daily exercises. [4] But Mindarus, the Lacedaemonian admiral, was inactive for some time at Miletus, expecting the aid promised by Pharnabazus; and when he heard that three hundred triremes had arrived from Phoenicia, he was buoyed up in his hopes, believing that with so great a fleet he could destroy the empire of the Athenians. [5] But when a little later he learned from sundry persons that Pharnabazus had been won over by Alcibiades and had sent the fleet back to Phoenicia, he gave up the hopes he had placed in Pharnabazus, and by himself, after equipping both the ships brought from the Peloponnesus and those supplied by his allies from abroad, he dispatched Dorieus with thirteen ships to Rhodes, since he had learned that certain Rhodians were banding together for a revolution.— [6] The ships we have mentioned had recently been sent to the Lacedaemonians as an allied force by certain Greeks of Italy.—And Mindarus himself took all the other ships, numbering eighty-three, and set out for the Hellespont, since he had learned that the Athenian fleet was tarrying at Samos. [7] The moment the generals of the Athenians saw them sailing by, they put out to sea against them with sixty ships. But when the Lacedaemonians put in at Chios, the Athenian generals decided to sail on to Lesbos and there to gather triremes from their allies, in order that it should not turn out that the enemy surpassed them in number of ships.
