On the other hand, there existed a party in the Council, composed, it may well be imagined, almost wholly, if not exclusively, of the representatives of Athens on that body, who insisted on the necessity of adopting some stronger line, and one sufficiently far north to save the Northern States from compulsory medism. The advocates of this Northern policy made up for the smallness of their numbers by their vigour and intelligence; but the decisive factor in the situation was the Athenian fleet. The selfish Corinthian trader and the ignorant Peloponnesian farmer were, from sheer inexperience and want of knowledge, utterly impervious to any argument founded on even the most elementary strategic considerations, and do not even appear to have fully recognized what the withdrawal of Athens and her fleet from the defence would have meant to the patriot Greeks. Nothing within their own meagre military experience could have taught them the full significance of the dual nature of the Persian attack. #THE PELOPONNESIAN POLICY.# Warfare as they understood it meant putting on as much armour as a careful citizen could carry, and meeting a similarly equipped foe on some piece of level ground, where he was either ravaging or being ravaged. It was fortunate for the Greek cause and for the advocates of the Northern policy that the preponderant state in the Peloponnese consisted of a body of soldiers. Stupid and dull of comprehension as the Spartan was when compared with the quick-witted Athenian, yet even he must, from the very circumstances of his life, since he lived for the profession of arms, have acquired an elementary knowledge of the art of war, sufficient to render him a capable judge of strategic questions, where the issue was sufficiently plain. The Spartans were forced at this time into an unwilling recognition of the fact that without the Athenian fleet the defence must collapse; and the Athenians for their part made it perfectly clear that, unless some effort was put forth on behalf of Greece north of the Isthmus, Athenians and Athenian fleet alike would vanish from Greece. The outcome of this contention of interests was the determination to defend Thermopylæ and Artemisium. Drawing his history largely from Athenian sources, Herodotus brings the selfishness of the Peloponnesian policy into special prominence. Selfish, indeed, it must have seemed to the Greeks north of the Isthmus, who probably recognized the strikingly defensible character of the line formed by Œta, notwithstanding that their acquaintance with the region north of the Bœotian plain seems to have been of an imperfect character.[115] But is it so strange that the Peloponnesian Greeks should have preferred a defensive line which they did know, and in which they believed, to one of which they had but imperfect knowledge? Some of them had just been involved in what they must have regarded as a fiasco,—that expedition to Thessaly.