Book 2
1.1
AT this point in my narrative begins the account of the actual warfare between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians and their respective allies. While it continued they ceased having communication with one another except through heralds, and when once they were at war they waged it without intermission. The events of the war have been recorded in the order of their occurrence, summer by summer and winter by winter.The mode of reckoning customary in the time of Thucydides and continued long afterwards. In such a scheme the summer included the spring and the winter the autumn; the summer period was equal to about eight months, the winter to about four.
2.1
For fourteen years the thirty years' truce which had been concluded after the capture of Euboea remained unbroken; but in the fifteenth year, when Chrysis was in the forty-eighth year of her priesthoodThe commencement of the war is fixed according to the forms of reckoning customary in the three most important Hellenic states. at Argos, and Aenesias was ephor at Sparta, and Pythodorus had still four months to serve as archon at Athens, in the sixteenth month after the battle of Potidaea, at the opening of431 B.C. spring, some Thebans, a little more than three hundred in number, under the command of the Boeotarchs Pythangelus son of Phyleidas and Diemporus son of Onetoridas, about the first watch of the night entered under arms into Plataea, a They had been invited over by some Plataeans, Naucleides and his partisans, who opened the gates for them, intending, with a view to getting power into their hands, to destroy the citizens who were of the opposite party and make over the city to
2.2
the Thebans. And they had conducted their intrigue through Eurymachus son of Leontiades, a man of great influence
