But though the Peloponnesians entertained confident belief of carrying their point by simple land-campaign, they did not neglect auxiliary preparations for naval and prolonged war. The Lacedæmonians resolved to make up the naval force already existing among themselves and their allies to an aggregate of five hundred triremes; chiefly by the aid of the friendly Dorian cities on the Italian and Sicilian coast. Upon each of them a specific contribution was imposed, together with a given contingent; orders being transmitted to them to make such preparations silently without any immediate declaration of hostility against Athens, and even without refusing for the present to admit any single Athenian ship into their harbors.[221] Besides this, the Lacedæmonians laid their schemes for sending envoys to the Persian king, and to other barbaric powers,—a remarkable evidence of melancholy revolution in Grecian affairs, when that potentate, whom the common arm of Greece had so hardly repulsed a few years before, was now invoked to bring the Phenician fleet again into the Ægean for the purpose of crushing Athens. [221] Thucyd. ii, 7. Diodorus says that the Italian and Sicilian allies were required to furnish two hundred triremes (xii, 41). Nothing of the kind seems to have been actually furnished. The invasion of Attica, however, without delay, was the primary object to be accomplished; and for that the Lacedæmonians issued circular orders immediately after the attempted surprise at Platæa. Though the vote of the allies was requisite to sanction any war, yet when that vote had once been passed, the Lacedæmonians took upon themselves to direct all the measures of execution. Two-thirds of the hoplites of each confederate city,—apparently two-thirds of a certain assumed rating, for which the city was held liable in the books of the confederacy, so that the Bœotians and others who furnished cavalry were not constrained to send two-thirds of their entire force of hoplites,—were summoned to be present on a certain day at the isthmus of Corinth, with provisions and equipment for an expedition of some length.[222] On the day named, the entire force was found duly assembled, and the Spartan king Archidamus, on taking the command, addressed to the commanders and principal officers from each city a discourse of solemn warning as well as encouragement. His remarks were directed chiefly to abate the tone of sanguine over-confidence which reigned in the army. After adverting to the magnitude of the occasion, the mighty impulse agitating all Greece, and the general good wishes which accompanied them against an enemy so much hated,—he admonished them not to let their great superiority of numbers and bravery seduce them into a spirit of rash disorder. “We are about to attack (he said) an enemy admirably equipped in every way, so that we may be very certain that they will come out and fight,[223] even if they be not now actually on the march to