Sophocles serves jointly with Pericles as general…

Mytilene, the port of Lesbos, is built on an island and later connected to Lesbos by causeway, forming the two harbors.

Lesbos takes its name “Pentapolis” from the five cities of Mytilene, Methymna, Antissa, Eresus, and Pyrrha. (Another important city is Arisba, northwest of Kalloní, which is destroyed by an earthquake in Herodotus' time.)

Athens' recent savage reduction of Samos, a member of the Delian League, does not stop Mytilene and most of Lesbos from appealing at some time in the prewar period to Sparta for encouragement in a revolt they are meditating.

No encouragement is given: Sparta is standing by the Thirty Years' Peace, at least for the time being.

Phormio, one of the generals who had led reinforcements to the Athenian siege of Samos in 440, assists the Acarnanians and Amphilochians against Ambracia around the same time.

This results in an alliance with Acarnania, a place close to areas of traditional Corinthian influence.

Legend has Spurius Maelius, a wealthy plebeian, buying up a large supply of grain and selling it at low prices to the Roman people during the severe famine of 440—439.

Lucius Minucius Augurinus, the patrician praefectus annonae (president of the market), thereupon accuses him of courting popularity with a view to making himself king; the cry is taken up.

Maelius, summoned in 439 before the aged Cincinnatus, specially appointed dictator to resolve the situation, refuses to appear, and is slain by magister equitum Gaius Servilius Ahala; his house is razed to the ground, his wheat distributed among the people, and his property confiscated.

The open space called Aequimaelium, on which his house had stood, preserves the memory of his death.

Cicero calls Ahala's deed a glorious one, but, whether Maelius entertained any ambitious projects or not, his summary execution was an act of murder, since by the Valerio-Horatian laws the dictator was bound to allow the right of appeal.

Ahala is brought to trial, and only escapes condemnation by going into voluntary exile.

A bill will be brought forward three years afterwards, in 436 BCE, by another Spurius Maelius, a tribune, for confiscating the property of Ahala, but it fails to pass.

(A related tradition, also discounted by most scholars, has Cincinnatus receiving a second dictatorship to check Maelius’s monarchial ambitions, then once again ceding the reins of power after the crisis ends.)

The Spartocid dynasty replaces that of the Archeanactids in the Bosporan Kingdom in 438 BCE, annexing to Panticapaeum other Greek colonies—e.g., Nymphaeum, which had been founded in the region in the seventh and sixth centuries.

Pericles takes a fleet into the Black Sea at an unknown date, but probably in the early 430s, to demonstrate Athenian power and secure the grain route from the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimean Peninsula in modern Ukraine). (According to another view, this event belongs in the 450s.)

The Romans break a forty-year truce with Veii, the richest city of the Etruscan League, on the southern border of Etruria, by attacking nearby Fidenae, an important outpost of the city just five miles from Rome, thus initiating in 438 BCE what will prove to be a long war.

Cratinus, a celebrated Athenian writer of comedies whose subjects are political, religious, literary, and mythological, makes Pericles a favorite target of his inventive and exuberant satire.

Athens makes another large-scale attempt, this one in 437-436 BCE successful, at colonizing Ennea Hodoi, “Nine Roads”,.

Located on the Strymon (Strimón) River about three miles from the Aegean Sea, in Macedonia, the new city, Amphipolis, is a strategic transportation center, controlling the bridge over the Strymon and the route from northern Greece to the Hellespont, including the western approach to the timber, gold, and silver of Mount Pangaeum in Thrace.

The newest Athenian colony is disconcertingly close to another outpost of Corinthian influence at Potidaea in the Chalcidice, and there is a possibility that Athens subjects Potidaea itself to financial pressure by the mid-430s.

An anomaly in being both tributary to Athens and simultaneously subject to direct rule by magistrates sent out annually by Corinth, Potidaea clearly is a sensitive spot in international relations.

Corinth is being indirectly pressured by Athens to the west (Acarnania and other places) and northeast (Amphipolis, Potidaea); …