[1] For the time being, then, all rested, expecting that on the morrow the fleets would engage. But Lysander was planning otherwise, and ordered his seamen and pilots, as though there would be a struggle at daybreak, to go on board their triremes in the early morning, and take their seats in order and in silence, awaiting the word of command, and that the land forces also, in the same manner, remain quietly in their ranks by the sea.
[2] When the sun rose, however, and the Athenians sailed up with all their ships in line and challenged to battle, although he had his ships drawn up in line to meet them and fully manned before it was light, he did not put out from his position, but sending despatch-boats to the foremost of his ships, ordered them to keep quiet and remain in line, not getting into confusion nor sailing out to meet the enemy.
[3] And so about midday when the Athenians sailed back, he did not allow men to leave their ships until two or three triremes, which he sent to reconnoiter, came hack, after seeing that the enemy had disembarked. On the following day this was done again, and on the third, and at last on the fourth, so that the Athenians became very bold and contemptuous, believing that their enemies were huddling together in fear.
[4] At this juncture, Alcibiades, who was living in his own fortress on the Chersonese, rode up to the Athenian army and censured the generals, first, for having pitched their camp in a bad and even dangerous place on an open beach where there was no roadstead; and second, for the mistake of getting their provisions from distant Sestos,
[5] when they ought to sail round the coast a little way to the harbor and city of Sestos, where they would be at a longer remove from their enemies, who lay watching them with an army commanded by a single man, the fear of whom led it to obey his every order promptly. These were the lessons he gave them, but they would not receive them, and Tydeus actually gave him an insolent answer, saying that he was not general now, but others.
1
Lysander. Plutarch. Bernadotte Perrin (Translator). Cambridge, MA. 1916.
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