Book 2
20.4
For he thought the post a favourable one for encamping in, and moreover that the Acharnians, forming as they did a large part of the state, (for they amounted to three thousand heavy-armed,) would not overlook the destruction of what belonged to them, but would stir up the whole army also to an engagement. If, on the other hand, the Athenians should not come out against him during that incursion, he would then lay waste the plain with less fear in future, and advance to the city itself; for the Acharnians, after losing their own property, would not be so forward to run into danger for that of other people, but there would be a division in their counsels.
20.5
It was with this view of the case that Archidamus remained at Acharnae.
21.1
As for the Athenians, so long as the army was in the neighbourhood of Eleusis and the Thriasian plain, they had some hope of its not advancing nearer; remembering the case of Pleistoanax, the son of Pausanias, the king of the Lacedaemonians, when with a Peloponnesian army he made an inroad into Attica, as far as Eleusis and Thria, fourteen years before this war, and retired again without advancing any further (for which reason indeed he was banished from Sparta, as he was thought to have been bribed to make the retreat).
21.2
When, however, they saw the army at Acharnae, only sixty stades from the city, they considered it no longer bearable, and, as was natural, when their land was being ravaged before their eyes—a thing which the younger men had never yet seen, nor even the elder, except in the Persian wars—it was thought a great indignity, and all of them, especially the young men, determined to go out against them, and not to put up with it.
