Worse was to come, because in 429, a terrible plague (probably typhoid fever) took away about a third of the Athenian citizens, including Pericles.
However, it soon became apparent that Pericles' strategy was too expensive, and the Athenian leader was deposed. The Athenian admiral Phormio retaliated with attacks on the Spartan navy ( text). In 431 and 430, the Spartan king Archidamus II invaded Attica (the countryside of Athens) and laid waste large parts of it. However, the operation was a failure, and Plataea was to be a major bone of contention for some time. If it had succeeded, Theban armies could easier move to the Peloponnese, and Peloponnesian armies would have been capable of marching to Boeotia. War broke out when the Thebans, without declaration of war, attempted to capture Plataea during a nightly attack ( text). They failed to achieve their aim, because they were captured by the Athenians ( text). note Thucydides also admits, much later, that the Spartans sent an embassy to the east.
This is only recorded by Diodorus, who mentions that the Spartans did not just declare war, but decided to declare war and ask for help in Persia. So, the Athenian position was better than that of their enemies, and it comes as no surprise that the Spartans immediately asked for help in Persia. Fragment of the Athenian Tribute List, 425-424 BCE
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As long as the " Long walls" connected the city to its port Piraeus, as long as Athens ruled the waves, and as long as Athens was free to strike from the sea against Sparta's coastal allies, it could create great tensions within the Spartan alliance. Cattle, for example, could be kept on the isle of Euboea. Pericles' strategy was to evacuate the countryside, leave it to the Spartans, and concentrate everyone in the city itself, which could receive supplies from across the sea. To achieve victory, Sparta had to force Athens into some kind of surrender on the other hand, Athens simply had to survive the attacks. And with some justification, because Athens had converted the Delian League, which had once been meant as a defensive alliance against the Persian Empire, into an Athenian empire. When Sparta declared war, it announced that it did so to liberate Greece from Athenian oppression. This was unacceptable, and war broke out between two regional empires: Athens and its Delian League, and Sparta and its Peloponnesian League. If the Athenians would yield to Sparta's request to revoke the Megarian Decree, they would in fact allow Sparta to give orders to Athens.
The Athenian leader Pericles refused this, because Sparta and Athens had once agreed that conflicts would be solved by arbitration. Peace was possible, they said, when Athens would revoke an economical decree against Megara, a Spartan ally. The Spartans started to fear that Athens was becoming too powerful but still tried to prevent war. To Sparta, this was dangerous: it needed the Corinthian navy. This threatened to reduce Corinth, until then an important city, to a third-rank power. In 433, Athens had concluded an alliance with Corcyra (modern Corfu more.), and had started to besiege Potidaea. The Archidamian War did not start without serious disturbances in the Greek balance of power.
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