the latter they could no longer with the same
advantage or satisfaction pay Hagnon his honours. They also gave the
Athenians back their dead. About six hundred of the latter had fallen
and only seven of the enemy, owing to there having been no regular
engagement, but the affair of accident and panic that I have described.
After taking up their dead the Athenians sailed off home, while
Clearidas and his troops remained to arrange matters at Amphipolis.

About the same time three Lacedaemonians--Ramphias, Autocharidas, and
Epicydidas--led a reinforcement of nine hundred heavy infantry to the
towns in the direction of Thrace, and arriving at Heraclea in Trachis
reformed matters there as seemed good to them. While they delayed there,
this battle took place and so the summer ended.

With the beginning of the winter following, Ramphias and his companions
penetrated as far as Pierium in Thessaly; but as the Thessalians opposed
their further advance, and Brasidas whom they came to reinforce was
dead, they turned back home, thinking that the moment had gone by,
the Athenians being defeated and gone, and themselves not equal to the
execution of Brasidas's designs. The main cause however of their return
was because they knew that when they set out Lacedaemonian opinion was
really in favour of peace.

Indeed it so happened that directly after the battle of Amphipolis and
the retreat of Ramphias from Thessaly, both sides ceased to prosecute
the war and turned their attention to peace. Athens had suffered
severely at Delium, and again shortly afterwards at Amphipolis, and
had no longer that confidence in her strength which had made her before
refuse to treat, in the belief of ultimate victory which her success
at the moment had inspired; besides, she was afraid of her allies being
tempted by her reverses to rebel more generally, and repented having
let go the splendid opportunity for peace which the affair of Pylos had
offered. Lacedaemon, on the other hand, found the event of the war to
falsify her notion that a few years would suffice for the overthrow of
the power of the Athenians by the devastation of their land. She had
suffered on the island a disaster hitherto unknown at Sparta; she saw
her country plundered from Pylos and Cythera; the Helots were deserting,
and she was in constant apprehension that those who remained in
Peloponnese would rely upon those outside and take advantage of the
situation to renew their old attempt