ABSTRACT
Thucydides begins his account of the fourth year of the war (428) with a brief summary of the third Spartan invasion of Attica, ‘at the same time as the corn was ripening’, about the middle of May. He has already told us that the longest invasion lasted forty days (2.57.2), so we can assume this one lasted for less, but all he says is that the invaders stayed as long as they had food (3.1.3). Since he also remarks on the effectiveness of the Athenian cavalry in confining enemy light troops to base on this occasion, though he implies that it had also been active during previous invasions (3.1.2),1 we may conclude that the invaders more or less had to make do with the provisions they brought, and that these did not last long.
