But, after all, it is an episode in the Peloponnesian war that has given this region its chief renown. This episode has been described in the luminous narrative of Thucydides; and the land and the book so exactly coincide that we can trace every movement of the Athenians and Spartans in that struggle of more than two months' duration. In one respect only is Thucydides's topography wide of the mark, for that he makes Sphacteria a mile too short is not important; he says that the southern entrance is broad enough for eight ships to sail in abreast, whereas it is approximately a mile wide. The whole Athenian fleet of fifty ships could easily sail in in line. Arnold of Rugby felt this difficulty so strongly that in his edition of Thucydides he advanced the view that Pylos was Sphacteria, supposing that the third opening at the time of Thucydides had not been silted up. He then sought Pylos in the northern promontory of the mainland. This, however, was jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire; for if one makes the middle mass Sphacteria the large island to the south, generally taken to be Sphacteria, is utterly ignored. There is no doubt that Thucydides in this one point departed from his principle of always getting information from eye-witnesses. Some have thought he got this broad opening confounded with a narrower one, which at that time, before the sand-bar reached clear up to Pylos, as it now does, led into the northern part of the bay, a sort of lagoon, affording a secure harbor, in which the Spartan fleet awaited attack, supported, morally at least, by the proximity of their land forces. In every other point the narrative fits the minutest _nuances_ of hill and shore. Most unexpectedly the seat of war was transferred to this quarter. In the spring of 425 B.C. an Athenian fleet was sailing past Pylos bound for Sicily, on which Athens even then had her eye, with instructions to attend first to the Spartan fleet that was hovering off Kerkyra, trying to bring the island over to the Peloponnesian alliance by the aid of their partisans then in exile near at hand. Accompanying the fleet was Demosthenes, the man of deeds, whose path through this war is marked with brightness. Ever capable and adequate to every emergency, he was at last destroyed, and Athens with him, by the incompetency of Nikias. In the previous year he had gained in Akarnania the greatest Athenian victory of the war, cutting off all the able-bodied men of Ambrakia and luring Sparta into a discreditable abandonment of her allies. In the full enjoyment of the public confidence he accompanied the fleet, with indefinite powers to use it in any way that seemed to be for the good of Athens.