Athens, the same armament was immediately conducted under Agnon and
Cleopompus, to press the siege of Potidaea, the blockade of which still
continued without any visible progress. On arriving there an attack was
made on the walls by battering engines and by the other aggressive
methods then practised; but nothing whatever was achieved. In fact, the
armament became incompetent for all serious effort, from the aggravated
character which the distemper here assumed, communicated by the soldiers
fresh from Athens even to those who had before been free from it at
Potidaea. So frightful was the mortality that out of the four thousand
hoplites under Agnon no fewer than one thousand and fifty died in the
short space of forty days. The armament was brought back in this
distressed condition to Athens, while the reduction of Potidaea was left
as before, to the slow course of blockade.

On returning from the expedition against Peloponnesus, Pericles found
his countrymen almost distracted with their manifold sufferings. Over
and above the raging epidemic they had just gone over Attica and
ascertained the devastations committed by the invaders throughout all
the territory--except the Marathonian Tetrapolis and Deceleia, districts
spared, as we are told, through indulgence founded on an ancient
legendary sympathy--during their long stay of forty days. The rich had
found their comfortable mansions and farms, the poor their modest
cottages, in the various _demes_, torn down and ruined. Death, sickness,
loss of property, and despair of the future now rendered the Athenians
angry and intractable to the last degree. They vented their feelings
against Pericles as the cause not merely of the war, but also of all
that they were now enduring. Either with or without his consent, they
sent envoys to Sparta to open negotiations for peace, but the Spartans
turned a deaf ear to the proposition. This new disappointment rendered
them still more furious against Pericles, whose long-standing political