Fearing then lest they catch sight of the full extent of his array and take refuge ashore, he ordered his fellow-commanders to sail slowly and so remain in the rear, while he himself, with only forty ships, hove in sight and challenged the foe to battle. The Peloponnesians were utterly deceived, and scorning what they deemed the small numbers of their enemy, put out to meet them, and closed at once with them in a grappling fight. Presently, while the battle was raging, the Athenian reserves bore down upon their foe, who were panic stricken and took to flight.
Edition :
Plutarch Lives IV: Alcibiades and Coriolanus, Lysander and Sulla, Ed. Jeffrey Henderson, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (The Loeb Classical Library 80), Harvard University Press: Cambridge/MA - London 2000 (first ed. 1916).
