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When the Athenians learned of the total destruction of their forces in Sicily, they were deeply distressed at the magnitude of the disaster. Yet they would not at all on that account abate their ardent aspiration for the supremacy, but set about both constructing more ships and providing themselves with funds wherewith they might contend to the last hope for the primacy. [2] Choosing four hundred men they put in their hands the supreme authority to direct the conduct of the war; for they assumed that an oligarchy was more suitable than a democracy in critical circumstances like these. [3] The events, however, did not turn out according to the judgement of those who held that opinion, but the Four Hundred conducted the war far less competently. For, although they dispatched forty ships, they sent along to command them two generals who were at odds with each other. Although, with the affairs of the Athenians at such low ebb, the emergency called for complete concord, the generals kept quarrelling with each other. [4] And finally they sailed to Oropus without preparation and met the Peloponnesians in a sea-battle; but since they made a wretched beginning of the battle and stood up to the fighting like churls, they lost twenty-two ships and barely got the rest safe over to Eretria. [5]

After these events had taken place, the allies of the Athenians, because of the defeats they had suffered in Sicily as well as the estranged relations of the commanders, revolted to the Lacedaemonians. And since Darius, the king of the Persians, was an ally of the Lacedaemonians, Pharnabazus, who had the military command of the regions bordering on the sea, supplied money to the Lacedaemonians; and he also summoned the three hundred triremes supplied by Phoenicia, having in mind to dispatch them to the aid of the Lacedaemonians.

Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus of Sicily in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation by C. H. Oldfather. Vol. 4-8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1989.

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