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The Athenians now turned their arms against the Chalcidians, who had retired to Euboea; but, encountering the Boeotians, who were on their march to assist their island ally, they engaged and defeated them with a considerable slaughter.
Brasidas himself was sent out by the Lacedaemonians mainly at his own desire, although the Chalcidians also were eager to have a man so thorough as he had shown himself whenever there was anything to be done at Sparta, and whose after-service abroad proved of the utmost use to his country.
And thenceforth, says Plutarch, the Chalcidians, who had previously mistrusted such friendships, cultivated and honoured them more than any other people. So much indeed were the Greeks impressed with the manliness of this passion, with its power to prompt to high thought and heroic action, that some of the best of them set the love of man for man far above that of man for woman.
The spirit animating the movement is shown by the two resolutions, that all clubs should be permanent and all actions for debt should be suspended till the restoration of peace. The Achaeans thus had war; and they had even actual allies, namely the Thebans and Boeotians and also the Chalcidians.
Meanwhile Sitalces opened negotiations with Perdiccas on the objects of his expedition; and finding that the Athenians, not believing that he would come, did not appear with their fleet, though they sent presents and envoys, dispatched a large part of his army against the Chalcidians and Bottiaeans, and shutting them up inside their walls laid waste their country.
None but the five ephors knew the bloody details. There was even no public examination of this savage inhumanity, which shows that Sparta was governed, as Venice was in the Middle Ages, by a small but exceedingly powerful oligarchy. After this cruelty was consummated, envoys came from Perdiccas and the Chalcidians of Thrace, invoking aid against Athens.
There is also a difference between the nobles in their wealth, and the dignity in which they live: for instance, in the number of horses they breed; for this cannot be supported without a large fortune: for which reason, in former times, those cities whose strength consisted in horse became by that means oligarchies; and they used horse in their expeditions against the neighbouring cities; as the Eretrians the Chalcidians, the Magnetians, who lived near the river Meander, and many others in Asia.
Himera was founded from Zancle by Euclides, Simus, and Sacon, most of those who went to the colony being Chalcidians; though they were joined by some exiles from Syracuse, defeated in a civil war, called the Myletidae. The language was a mixture of Chalcidian and Doric, but the institutions which prevailed were the Chalcidian.
Thereupon Cleomenes collected a Peloponnesian army in order to establish Isagoras as a tyrant over the Athenians, and at the same time he concerted measures with the Thebans and the Chalcidians of Euboea for a simultaneous attack upon Attica.
At length he threw off the mask, and at the head of a considerable force seized upon the holy city of Eleusis. Threatened by this threefold invasion, the measures of the Athenians were prompt and vigorous. They left for the present unavenged the incursions of the Boeotians and Chalcidians, and marched with all the force they could collect against Cleomenes at Eleusis.
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